A Study on the Influence of Software and Hardware Features on Program Energy

Abstract

Software energy consumption has emerged as a growing concern in recent years. Managing the energy consumed by a software is, however, a difficult challenge due to the large number of factors affecting it -- namely, features of the processor, memory, cache, and other hardware components, characteristics of the program and the workload running, OS routines, compiler optimisations, among others. In this paper we study the relevance of numerous architectural and program features (static and dynamic) to the energy consumed by software. The motivation behind the study is to gain an understanding of the features affecting software energy and to provide recommendations on features to optimise for energy efficiency. In our study we used 58 subject desktop programs, each with their own workload, and from different application domains. We collected over 100 hardware and software metrics, statically and dynamically, using existing tools for program analysis, instrumentation and run time monitoring. We then performed statistical feature selection to extract the features relevant to energy consumption. We discuss potential optimisations for the selected features. We also examine whether the energy-relevant features are different from those known to affect software performance. The features commonly selected in our experiments were execution time, cache accesses, memory instructions, context switches, CPU migrations, and program length (Halstead metric). All of these features are known to affect software performance, in terms of running time, power consumed and latency.