Experimental Workflow for Energy and Temperature Profiling on HPC Systems

Despite recent advances in improving the performance of high performance computing (HPC) and distributed systems, power dissipation and thermal cooling challenges persist, impacting their total cost of ownership. Making HPC systems more energy and thermal efficient will require understanding of individual power dissipation and temperature contributions of multiple hardware system components and their accompanying software. In this work, we present an experimental workflow for energy and temperature profiling on systems running parallel applications. It allows full and dynamic control over the execution of applications for the entire frequency range. Through its use, we show that the energy response to frequency scaling is highly dependent on the workload characteristics and it is convex in nature with an optimal frequency point. During the course of our experimentation, we encountered a non-intuitive finding, where we observed that the tested low-power processor is consuming more power on average than the standard processor.