Practice on Program Energy Consumption Optimization by Energy Measurement and Analysis Using FPowerTool

Abstract

Energy-aware programming (EAP) is a new approach to reduce energy consumption of computing systems. It introduces energy as one of the main design metrics into the process of software development to reduce program energy consumption by adjusting the way of programming. The implementation of EAP is facing some difficulties in finding energy consumption hot spots, identifying main factors which cause excessive energy consumption, and locating inappropriate code segments in the program. To address these issues, this paper proposes a new method called EPC (energy-performance correlation) for joint measurement and analysis of energy consumption and perfor-mance events during program execution. Firstly, the basic principles of EPC are introduced and the implementation of an EPC-based tool, FPowerTool, for program energy consumption measurement and analysis is presented. Then, the method of energy-performance events correlation analysis for identifying the main factors influencing energy consumption is presented. Finally, a set of programs is used as case studies to show how to locate the code segments related to high energy consumption by correlation analysis, and how to change the coding and data placement and access to reduce the program energy consumption. The experiment results show that based on the energy-aware and analysis capabilities provided by the EPC method, program performance and energy efficiency can be improved by improving data definition, assignment, placement, and access methods.

Keywords

• |energy-aware|energy consumption optimization|performance event|energy-performance correlation