A Hardware-Software Cooperative Approach for Application Energy Profiling

Energy consumption by software applications is a critical issue that determines the future of multicore software development. In this article, we propose a hardware-software cooperative approach that uses hardware support to efficiently gather the energy-related hardware counters during program execution, and utilizes parameter estimation models in software to compute the energy consumption by instructions at a finer grain level (say basic block). We design mechanisms to minimize collinearity in profiler data, and present results to validate our energy estimation methodology.