Energy Predictive Models of Computing: Theory, Practical Implications and Experimental Analysis on Multicore Processors

The energy efficiency in ICT is becoming a grand technological challenge and is now a first-class design constraint in all computing settings. Energy predictive modelling based on performance monitoring counters (PMCs) is the leading method for application-level energy optimization. However, a sound theoretical framework to understand the fundamental significance of the PMCs to the energy consumption and the causes of the inaccuracy of the models is lacking. In this work, we propose a small but insightful theory of energy predictive models of computing, which formalizes both the assumptions behind the existing PMC-based energy predictive models and properties, heretofore unconsidered, that are basic implications of the universal energy conservation law. The theory's basic practical implications include selection criteria for model variables, model intercept, and model coefficients. The experiments on two modern Intel multicore servers show that applying the proposed selection criteria improves the prediction accuracy of state-of-the-art linear regression models from 31.2% to 18%. Finally, we demonstrate that employing energy models constructed using the proposed theory for energy optimization can save a significant amount of energy (up to 80% for applications used in experiments) compared to state-of-the-art energy measurement tools.