Automatic Energy-Efficiency Monitoring of OpenMP Workloads

Abstract : Energy-efficiency has been a major challenge in compute systems over the last decade. Both embedded and highperformance computing domains are concerned. Many efforts have been currently spent to devise solutions that are capable of providing systems with the best compromises in terms of performance and power consumption. In this paper, we propose an approach for on-line energy-efficiency analysis when executing OpenMP workloads on multicore systems. The novelty of our approach lies in the ability to monitor energy efficiency at runtime without prior knowledge of the application profile or code annotation. The solution relies on two new metrics: the Chunks per Second (CpS) and Chunks per Joule (CpJ). The former captures the quantity of work achieved by threads per unit time (i.e. a performance indicator). The latter indicates the quantity of work achieved by threads per unit energy, also corresponding to the performance per watt (i.e. an energy efficiency indicator). As most programs are made of several phases performing different computations for which CpS and CpJ cannot be related, it is crucial to be capable of detecting phase changes such as to perform intra-phase energy efficiency optimizations. For that purpose we devise a specific neural network model derived from the popular auto-encoder largely explored in the machine learning community, that is capable of understanding application profile and track phase changes at run-time. We show that these new metrics allow to perform energy efficiency optimization, and illustrate our approach on the analysis of the SRAD application from the Rodinia benchmark. The energy-efficiency profile analysis of the application is conducted on both an Intel and ARM platforms, showing its flexibility.