Copyright by William Lloyd Bircher 2010 - The Laboratory for ...

demonstrate a correlation between observable performance events and power
consumption. He shows that a correlation exists for: µops/sec, fµops/sec, L2
accesses/sec and memory accesses/sec. Since only synthetic workloads are characterized,
these results are not representative of realistic workloads. The most closely related work
is by Isci et al [IsMa03]. They build a comprehensive power model based on utilization
factors of the various components of the processor. Using 22 performance monitoring
counters they model average power consumption of SPEC2000 workloads within 5%.
The models in this dissertation yields similar accuracy, yet with only two PMC metrics
that aggregate power consumption across the numerous processor functional units. A
major limitation of all of these contemporary works is the lack of awareness of power
management and temperature effects. The dissertation models accurately account for
power fluctuations due to clock gating, DVFS and temperature variation.
Existing studies in system-level power modeling [Ja01] [ZeSo03] [KiSu06] have relied
on events local to the subsystem. The model in this dissertation is the first to encompass
complete system power using only events local to the processor. The most closely
related work by Heath [GuSi02], models CPU, network and disk power using operating
system counters. This model does not account for memory and chipset power. Since it
relies on comparatively high-overhead operating system routines, the run-time
performance cost is higher compared to the dissertation model that uses only fast, on-chip
performance counters.
148