Data-Driven Power Modeling and Monitoring via Hardware Performance Counter Tracking

2025-06-30

AI Summary

To address the challenges of low accuracy, high overhead, and slow response in online power estimation under enhanced hardware heterogeneity and increased parallelism for embedded systems, this paper proposes a lightweight system-level power modeling and real-time monitoring method based on Performance Monitoring Counters (PMCs). The method constructs a modular, linear-correlation-driven power model that requires no microarchitectural details and supports flexible, rapid reconfiguration across DVFS states. Integrated with the Linux kernel-level framework Runmeter, it enables low-overhead PMC sampling and runtime power estimation. Experimental results demonstrate an average power estimation error of only 7.5%, energy error of 1.3%, and worst-case kernel monitoring overhead below 0.7%. This enables effective closed-loop task scheduling and workload-aware DVFS control.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Hardware-aware ML
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Plan Execution and Monitoring
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Cost models of using LLMs in production systems

Abstract

Energy-centric design is paramount in the current embedded computing era: use cases require increasingly high performance at an affordable power budget, often under real-time constraints. Hardware heterogeneity and parallelism help address the efficiency challenge, but greatly complicate online power consumption assessments, which are essential for dynamic hardware and software stack adaptations. We introduce a novel power modeling methodology with state-of-the-art accuracy, low overhead, and high responsiveness, whose implementation does not rely on microarchitectural details. Our methodology identifies the Performance Monitoring Counters (PMCs) with the highest linear correlation to the power consumption of each hardware sub-system, for each Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) state. The individual, simple models are composed into a complete model that effectively describes the power consumption of the whole system, achieving high accuracy and low overhead. Our evaluation reports an average estimation error of 7.5% for power consumption and 1.3% for energy. We integrate these models in the Linux kernel with Runmeter, an open-source, PMC-based monitoring framework. Runmeter manages PMC sampling and processing, enabling the execution of our power models at runtime. With a worst-case time overhead of only 0.7%, Runmeter provides responsive and accurate power measurements directly in the kernel. This information can be employed for actuation policies in workload-aware DVFS and power-aware, closed-loop task scheduling.

Problem

• Accurate online power consumption assessment for heterogeneous hardware
• Low-overhead power modeling without microarchitectural details
• Dynamic hardware and software adaptation under power constraints

Innovation

• PMC-based power modeling with high accuracy
• Dynamic DVFS state-specific linear correlation
• Linux-integrated Runmeter for low-overhead monitoring