Profiling Software for Energy Consumption

Abstract

The amount of energy consumed by computer systems can be lowered through the use of more efficient algorithms and software. Unfortunately, software developers lack the tools to pinpoint energy-hungry sections in their code and therefore have to rely on their intuition when trying to optimize their code for energy consumption. We have developed eprof, a profiler that relates energy consumption to code locations, it attributes both the synchronously consumed energy in the CPU and the asynchronously consumed energy in peripheral devices like hard drives, network cards, etc. Eprof requires minimal changes to the kernel (tens of lines of code) and does not require special hardware to energy-profile software. Therefore eprof can be widely used to help developers make energy-aware decisions.