A study of model-specific registers for energy consumption measurement in concurrent algorithms

Abstract

For a long time the increase in clock frequency and microarchitectural improvements contributed to faster processors. During the last decade, however, power dissipation limits and the difficulty in exploiting microarchitecture features (such as multiple instructions dispatching) forced the industry to adopt a new architectural model: multicore processors. The first issue introduced by the parallel model is that programmers need to explicitly design the application in order to make use of all available cores. Besides, the energy consumption is currently regarded as a key point in application design and might be the primary concern depending on the project goals. Embedded systems are a clear example wherein energy consumption plays a vital role due to battery lifetime constraints. This research project aims at studying the Model-Specific Registers (MSR), initially introduced by Intel for the x86 instruction set architecture. In particular, we intend to study the RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) registers and how to employ them to measure energy consumption. The motivation for this study is the development of a methodology for energy consumption evaluation that can be used in the analysis of energy/performance tradeoffs in concurrent algorithms. (AU)