Energy Efficiency of Parallel Multicore Programs

Abstract

The increasing energy consumption of large-scale high performance resources raises technical and economical concerns. A reduction of consumed energy in multicore systems is possible to some extent with an optimized usage of computing and memory resources that is tailored to specific HPC applications. The essential step towards more sustainable consumption of energy is its reliable measurements for each component of the system and selection of optimally configured resources for specific applications. This paper briefly surveys the current approaches for measuring and profiling power consumption in large scale systems. Then, a practical case study of a real-time power measurement of multicore computing system is presented on two real HPC applications: maximum clique algorithm and numerical weather prediction model. We assume that the computing resources are allocated in a HPC cloud on a pay-per-use basis. The measurements demonstrate that the minimal energy is consumed when all available cores (up to the scaling limit for a particular application) are used on their maximal frequencies and with threads binded to the cores.