A Comprehensive Guide to Measuring the Power and Energy of Modern Systems

Victor Lee is a principal engineer and research scientist at Intel’s Parallel Computing Lab. His research interests include emerging applications, application analysis and auto-tuning as well as computer architecture. He is currently working on analyzing the HW/SW interactions between HPC/Big-data applications and modern processor architecture and on developing innovative architecture features to improve application and processor (performance and energy) efficiency. Victor received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from University of Washington in 1994, S.M. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996. He joined Intel in 1997 and had worked on many Intel processors include Intel Pentium Pro, Intel Pentium 4, and Intel Itanium processors. In 2002, Victor moved to Intel Labs and spearheaded the many-core research which eventually lead to the Intel Many Integrated Core architecture and the first Intel Xeon Phi coprocessor product. He is a senior member of IEEE. He has 30+ professional publications, 15+ granted patents and more than 30 pending patent applications worldwide. Jee Choi is a postdoctoral research at IBM TJ Watson Research Center. Kirk W. Cameron is a professor of computer science and a research fellow in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. The central theme of his research is to improve power and performance efficiency in high performance computing (HPC) systems and applications. Prof. Cameron is a pioneer and leading expert in Green Computing. Cameron is also the Green IT columnist for IEEE Computer, Green500 co-founder, founding member of SPECPower, EPA consultant, Uptime Institute Fellow, and co-founder of power management software startup company MiserWare. His advanced power measurement software infrastructure for research, (PowerPack), is used by dozens of research groups around the world. His power management software, Granola, is used by hundreds of thousands of people in more than 160 countries.

Introduction. What is power/energy? How is power measured and calculated? Metrics for power /energy efficiency. History of power and energy throughout history. Fundamentals of Power / Energy Consumption. How transistors consume power. Active, static, leakage, and others. Impact of frequency and temperature. Source of power consumption in modern systems. Logic chips, voltage regulators, analog circuits, power supplies, etc. Methods of Measuring Power. Software. RAPL, NVML, PAPI. Hardware. AC. DC. Coarse grained. Fine grained. Component power measurement. CPU. GPU. Memory. NIC. Network devices. Power supply. Common mistakes and how to avoid them. Experimental Design and Analysis. Suggested course projects. Case studies.