Cross Architectural Power Modelling Kai Chen1, Peter Kilpatrick1, Dimitrios S. Nikolopoulos2, and Blesson Varghese1 1Queen’s University Belfast, UK; 2Virginia Tech, USA E-mail:
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[email protected] Abstract—Existing power modelling research focuses on the processor are extensively explored using a cumbersome trial model rather than the process for developing models. An auto- and error approach after which a suitable few are selected [7]. mated power modelling process that can be deployed on different Such an approach does not easily scale for various processor processors for developing power models with high accuracy is developed. For this, (i) an automated hardware performance architectures since a different set of hardware counters will be counter selection method that selects counters best correlated to required to model power for each processor. power on both ARM and Intel processors, (ii) a noise filter based Currently, there is little research that develops automated on clustering that can reduce the mean error in power models, and (iii) a two stage power model that surmounts challenges in methods for selecting hardware counters to capture proces- using existing power models across multiple architectures are sor power over multiple processor architectures. Automated proposed and developed. The key results are: (i) the automated methods are required for easily building power models for a hardware performance counter selection method achieves compa- collection of heterogeneous processors as seen in traditional rable selection to the manual method reported in the literature, data centers that host multiple generations of server proces- (ii) the noise filter reduces the mean error in power models by up to 55%, and (iii) the two stage power model can predict sors, or in emerging distributed computing environments like dynamic power with less than 8% error on both ARM and Intel fog/edge computing [8] and mobile cloud computing (in these processors, which is an improvement over classic models.