Accurate Energy Modelling of Hybrid Parallel Applications on Modern Heterogeneous Computing Platforms Using System-Level Measurements

Modern high-performance computing platforms, cloud computing systems, and data centers are highly heterogeneous containing nodes where a multicore CPU is tightly integrated with accelerators. An important challenge for energy optimization of hybrid parallel applications on such platforms is how to accurately estimate the energy consumption of application components running on different compute devices of the platform. In this work, we propose a method for accurate estimation of the application component-level energy consumption employing system-level power measurements with power meters. We experimentally validate the method on a cluster of two hybrid heterogeneous computing nodes using three parallel applications - matrix-matrix multiplication, 2D fast Fourier transform and gene sequencing. The experiments demonstrate a high estimation accuracy of the proposed method, with the average estimation error ranging between 2% and 5%. The average error demonstrated by the state-of-the-art estimation methods for the same experimental setup ranges from 15% to 75%, while the maximum reaches 178%. We also show that the use of the state-of-the-art estimation methods instead of the proposed one in the energy optimization loop leads to significant energy losses (up to 45% in our case).