Using complete machine simulation for software power estimation: the SoftWatt approach

Author

Gurumurthi, Sudhanva ; Sivasubramaniam, Anand ; Irwin, M.J. ; Vijaykrishnan, N. ; Kandemir, Mahmut

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA, USA

fYear

2002

fDate

2-6 Feb. 2002

Firstpage

141

Lastpage

150

Abstract

Power dissipation has become one of the most critical factors for the continued development of both high-end and low-end computer systems. We present a complete system power simulator, called SoftWatt, that models the CPU, memory hierarchy, and a low-power disk subsystem and quantifies the power behavior of both the application and operating system. This tool, built on top of the SimOS infrastructure, uses validated analytical energy models to identify the power hotspots in the system components, capture relative contributions of the user and kernel code to the system power profile, identify the power-hungry operating system services and characterize the variance in kernel power profile with respect to workload. Our results using Spec JVM98 benchmark suite emphasize the importance of complete system simulation to understand the power impact of architecture and operating system on application execution.

Keywords

computer power supplies; digital simulation; performance evaluation; power consumption; utility programs; CPU; SimOS; SoftWatt; Spec JVM98 benchmark; memory; operating system; power optimization; power profile; simulation tools; software power estimation; Application software; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Design optimization; Hardware; Kernel; Operating systems; Power dissipation; Power system modeling; Technological innovation;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

High-Performance Computer Architecture, 2002. Proceedings. Eighth International Symposium on

ISSN

1530-0897

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1525-8

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/HPCA.2002.995705

Filename

995705