Model-based optimization of the energy efficiency of multi-threaded applications

Energy efficiency is considered to be a critical concern for modern hardware and a variety of hardware features have been developed to improve the energy balance for executing applications. This article focuses on the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technique, which is available for many platforms. Analytical models for capturing the energy efficiency are considered and it is investigated whether such an analytical model is able to support an a priori selection of the operational frequency that leads to a near optimal energy consumption for the application code to be executed. Furthermore, the possible influence of the number of threads executing a multi-threaded application is taken into account. Models for the energy-delay product (EDP) weighting the power against the square of execution time are also covered. The experimental evaluation is performed on the basis of the multi-threaded PARSEC and SPLASH2 benchmarks executed on four different recent multi-cores. The investigations show that the operational frequency selected according to the analytical models leads to an energy consumption that is near the minimum energy consumption over all frequencies available. (C) 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.