A high-level and accurate energy model of parallel and concurrent workloads

Summary The ability to predict the energy needed by a system to perform a task, or several concurrent parallel tasks, allows the scheduler to enforce energy‐aware policies while providing acceptable performance. The approaches in literature to model energy consumption of tasks usually focus on low‐level descriptors and require invasive instrumentation of the computational environment. We developed an energy model and a methodology to automatically extract features that characterize the computational environment relying only on a single power meter that measures the energy consumption of the whole system. Once the model has been built, the energy consumption of concurrent tasks can be calculated, with a statistically insignificant error, even without any power meter. We show that our model can predict with high accuracy, even only using the utilization time of the cores in a high‐performance computing enclosure, without using performance counters. Hence, the model could be easily applicable to heterogeneous systems, where collecting representative performance counters can be problematic. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.