Automatic estimation of DVFS potential

Engineers obsessed in the past with augmenting application performance. Nowadays, as the energy price tag and ecological concerns rise, administrators and engineers are considering the energy consumption metric as new optimization criteria. In order to decrease energy consumption, one known solution is Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS). DVFS allows users to modify the CPU frequency in order to reduce energy consumption. Although the technique is efficient, its real potential is often difficult to predict. The following paper presents UtoPeak, a tool able to compute the sequence of frequencies providing the lowest energy consumption for a given program execution. Associated to the ideal frequency sequence, Utopeak predicts, ahead of time, the potential impact of DVFS on energy consumption. The paper shows how Utopeak is able to predict the potential gains for known benchmark suites. Utopeak´s accuracy in predicting the best energy consumption is 95.6% in average on the benchmark suites SPEC2006 and NAS.