ARDUPOWER: A low-cost wattmeter to improve energy efficiency of HPC applications

Power measurement is essential for power-/energy-aware performance optimizations in large-scale HPC systems and applications. A suitable power monitoring solution in such systems faces certain requirements. Although a variety of commercial power measurement devices already exist in the market, there is yet room for improvement. This paper enumerates the attributes of wattmeters suitable for HPC machines and then introduces ARDUPOWER, a new device specifically designed to be deployed for power measurement in computing systems. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages of this wattmeter in support of the requirements in scientific HPC applications. Finally, we provide experimental results for a number of benchmarks running on a server machine, intensively excercising the main components of the system such as CPU, memory, HDD and NIC to evaluate the accuracy of the new wattmeter measurements in a comparison with a professional external power monitoring device. A real-world HPC application is also traced from the power point of view to demonstrate the benefits of ARDUPOWER, conceived to be a simple, small and low-cost wattmeter.