High Performance Computing (HPC) has become an indispensable tool for the scientific community to perform simulations on models whose complexity would exceed the limits of a standard computer. An unfortunate trend concerning HPC systems is that their power consumption under high-demanding workloads increases. To counter this trend, hardware vendors have implemented power saving mechanisms in recent years, which has increased the variability in power demands of single nodes. These capabilities provide an opportunity to increase the energy efficiency of HPC applications. To utilize these hardware power saving mechanisms efficiently, their overhead must be analyzed. Furthermore, applications have to be examined for performance and energy efficiency issues, which can give hints for optimizations. This requires an infrastructure that is able to capture both, performance and power consumption information concurrently. The mechanisms that such an infrastructure would inherently support could further be used to implement a tool that is able to do both, measuring and tuning of energy efficiency.
This thesis targets all steps in this process by making the following contributions: First, I provide a broad overview on different related fields. I list common performance measurement tools, power measurement infrastructures, hardware power saving capabilities, and tuning tools. Second, I lay out a model that can be used to define and describe energy efficiency tuning on program region scale. This model includes hardware and software dependent parameters. Hardware parameters include the runtime overhead and delay for switching power saving mechanisms as well as a contemplation of their scopes and the possible influence on application performance. Thus, in a third step, I present methods to evaluate common power saving mechanisms and list findings for different x86 processors. Software parameters include their performance and power consumption characteristics as well as the influence of power-saving mechanisms on these. To capture software parameters, an infrastructure for measuring performance and power consumption is necessary. With minor additions, the same infrastructure can later be used to tune software and hardware parameters. Thus, I lay out the structure for such an infrastructure and describe common components that are required for measuring and tuning. Based on that, I implement adequate interfaces that extend the functionality of contemporary performance measurement tools. Furthermore, I use these interfaces to conflate performance and power measurements and further process the gathered information for tuning. I conclude this work by demonstrating that the infrastructure can be used to manipulate power-saving mechanisms of contemporary x86 processors and increase the energy efficiency of HPC applications.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:30624 |
| Date | 19 September 2017 |
| Creators | Schöne, Robert |
| Contributors | Nagel, Wolfgang E., Ludwig, Thomas, Technische Universität Dresden |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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