A fine-grained component-level power measurement method

Abstract

The ever growing energy consumption of computer systems have become a more and more serious problem in the past few years. Power profiling is a fundamental way for us to better understand where, when and how energy is consumed. This paper presents a direct measurement method to measure the power of main computer components with fine time granularity. To achieve this goal, only small amount of extra hardware are employed. An approach to synchronize power dissipation with program phases has also been proposed in this paper. Based on the preliminary version of our tools, we measure the power of CPU, memory and disk when running SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks, and prove that measurement with fine time granularity is essential. The phenomenon we observe from memory power may be served as a guide for memory management or architecture design towards energy efficiency.