Tracing and Visualization of Energy-Related Metrics

In an effort to reduce the energy consumption of high-performance computing centers, a number of new approaches have been developed in the last few years. One of these approaches is to switch hardware to lower power states in phases of device idleness or low utilization. Even if the concepts are already quite clear, tools to identify these phases in applications and to determine impact on performance and power consumption are still missing. In this paper, we investigate the tracing of energy-related metrics into our existing tracing environment in an effort to correlate them with the application. We implement tracing of performance and sleep states of the processor, the disk and the network device states in addition to the node power consumption. The exemplary energy efficiency analysis visually correlates the application with the energy-related metrics. With this correlation, it is possible to identify and further avoid waiting times caused by mode switches initiated by the user or the system.