E-Team: Practical Energy Accounting for Multi-Core Systems

Energy-based billing as well as energy-efficient software require accurate knowledge of energy consumption. Model-based energy accounting and external measurement hardware are the main methods to obtain energy data, but cost and the need for frequent recalibration have impeded their large-scale adoption. Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) by Intel® enables non-intrusive, off-the-shelf energy monitoring, but only on a per-socket level. To enable apportioning of energy to individual applications we present E-Team, a non-intrusive, scheduler-based, easy-to-use energy-accounting mechanism. By leveraging RAPL, our method can be used on any Intel system built after 2011 without the need for external infrastructure, application modification, or model calibration. E-Team allows starting and stopping measurements at arbitrary points in time while maintaining a low performance overhead. E-Team provides high accuracy, compared to external instrumentation, with an error of less than 3:5 %.