Section: Research Program

Energy Application Profiling and Modeling

Despite recent improvements, there is still a long road to follow in order to obtain energy efficient, energy proportional and eco-responsible exascale systems by 2022. Energy efficiency is therefore a major challenge for building next generation large-scale platforms. The targeted platforms will gather hundreds of millions of cores, low power servers, or CPUs. Besides being very important, their power consumption will be dynamic and irregular.

Thus, to consume energy efficiently, we aim at investigating two research directions. First, we need to improve measurement, understanding, and analysis on how large-scale platforms consume energy. Unlike approaches  [34] that mix the usage of internal and external wattmeters on a small set of resources, we target high frequency and precise internal and external energy measurements of each physical and virtual resource on large-scale distributed systems.

Secondly, we need to find new mechanisms that consume less and better on such platforms. Combined with hardware optimizations, several works based on shutdown or slowdown approaches aim at reducing energy consumption of distributed platforms and applications. To consume less, we first plan to explore the provision of accurate estimation of the energy consumed by applications without pre-executing and knowing them while most of the works try to do it based on in-depth application knowledge (code instrumentation  [37], phase detection for specific HPC applications  [42], etc.). As a second step, we aim at designing a framework model that allows interaction, dialogue and decisions taken in cooperation among the user/application, the administrator, the resource manager, and the energy supplier. While smart grid is one of the last killer scenarios for networks, electrical provisioning of next generation large IT infrastructures remains a challenge.