Measuring energy consumption using EML (energy measurement library)

• DOI: 10.1007/s00450-014-0269-5
• Publication Date: 2014-07-04T05:27:00Z
• Authors: Alberto Cabrera; Francisco Almeida; Javier Arteaga; Vicente Blanco
• Keywords: Software portability; Energy Independence

Energy consumption and efficiency is a main issue in high performance computing systems in order to reach exascale computing. Researchers in the field are focusing their effort in reducing the first and increasing the latter while there is no current standard for energy measurement. Current energy measurement tools are specific and architectural dependent and this has to be addressed. By creating a standard tool, it is possible to generate independence between the experiments and the hardware, and thus, researchers effort can be focused in energy, by maximizing the portability of the code used for experimentation with the multiple architectures we have access nowadays. We present the energy measurement library (EML) library, a software library that eases the access to the energy measurement tools and can be easily extended to add new measurement systems. Using EML, it is viable to obtain architectural and algorithmic parameters that affect energy consumption and efficiency. The use of this library is tested in the field of the analytic modeling of the energy consumed by parallel programs.