Power Characterisation of Shared-Memory HPC Systems

Abstract

Energy consumption has become one of the greatest challenges in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). Besides its impact on the environment, energy is a limiting factor for the HPC. Keeping the power consumption of a system below a threshold is one of the great problems; and power prediction can help to solve it. The power characterisation can be used to know the power behaviour of the system under study, and to be a support to reach the power prediction. Furthermore, it could be used to design power-aware application programs. In this article we propose a methodology to characterise the power consumption of shared-memory HPC systems. Our proposed methodology involves the finding of influence factors on power consumed by the systems. It is similar to previous works, but we propose an in-deep approach that can help us to get a better power characterisation of the system. We apply our methodology to characterise an Intel server platform and the results show that we can find a more extended set of influence factors on power consumption.