Safari: Function-level power analysis using automatic instrumentation

Abstract

Resolving excessive power dissipation of modern computer systems has become a substantial challenge. However, few research projects have targeted on application power analysis or application-aware power management, which becomes a rising factor in energy efficient system design. In this paper, we describe and implement an application function (subroutine call) level profiler, Safari. It can be used to generate power profiles of each function in an automatic manner. The experiment results using NPB parallel benchmark suite show that Safari is able to collect function level run-time information with overhead (16% on average) comparable to gprof. The power profiling results can be used for code optimization, power-aware scheduling, or even computing resource billing for future research.