FRESCO: A Framework to Estimate the Energy Consumption of Computers

Many application areas, e.g., demand response, energy accounting or energy-aware scheduling, require estimates of the energy consumption of computer systems. However, existing estimation approaches often make restrictive assumptions regarding the effort at setup time or run time that is acceptable, they are tailored for specific hardware or software, or they cannot provide accuracy guarantees for the estimates. In this paper, we introduce FRESCO, a Framework for the Energy estimation of Computers. FRESCO is a flexible framework for the estimation of the energy consumption of a wide range of computer systems. In particular, FRESCO considers technical information of the hardware manufacturer, system specifications like the average load, information that have been sampled at run time, e.g., the time the CPU spent in a specific state, and energy consumption profiles that might have been learned at setup time. Based on accuracy requirements and information available, FRESCO deploys and executes appropriate estimators. We have evaluated FRESCO with three real-world use cases. Our evaluation shows that FRESCO produces meaningful estimates for a wide range of analytical scenarios.