Preprint – To appear in the IEEE Int’l. Parallel & Distributed Processing Symp. (IPDPS), May 2013 A roofline model of energy Jee Whan Choi Daniel Bedard, Robert Fowler Richard Vuduc Georgia Institute of Technology Renaissance Computing Institute Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, Georgia, USA Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA Atlanta, Georgia, USA
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[email protected] [email protected] Abstract—We describe an energy-based analogue of the time- or alternative explanations about time, energy, and power based roofline model. We create this model from the perspective relationships. of algorithm designers and performance tuners, with the intent not of making exact predictions, but rather, developing high- First, when analyzing time, the usual first-order analytic level analytic insights into the possible relationships among tool is to assess the balance of the processing system [7]– the time, energy, and power costs of an algorithm. The model [12]. Recall that balance is the ratio of work the system expresses algorithms in terms of operations, concurrency, and can perform per unit of data transfer. To this notion of memory traffic; and characterizes the machine based on a time-balance, we define an energy-balance analogue, which small number of simple cost parameters, namely, the time and energy costs per operation or per word of communication. We measures the ratio of flops and bytes per unit-energy (e.g., confirm the basic form of the model experimentally. From this Joules). We compare balancing computations in time against model, we suggest under what conditions we ought to expect balancing in energy. [xII] an algorithmic time-energy trade-off, and show how algorithm Secondly, we use energy-balance to develop an energy- properties may help inform power management.