Proactive Energy-Aware Programming with PEEK

Optimization of application and system software for energy efficiency is of ecological, economical, and technical importance—and still challenging. Deficiency in adequate tooling support is a major issue. The few tools available (i.e., measurement instruments, energy profilers) have poorly conceived interfaces and their integration into widely used development processes is missing. This implies time-consuming, tedious measurements and profiling runs and aggravates, if not shoots down, the development of energy-efficient software.

We present PEEK, a systems approach to proactive energy-aware programming. PEEK fully automates energy measurement tasks and suggests program-code improvements at development time by providing automatically generated energy optimization hints. Our approach is based on a combined software and hardware infrastructure to automatically determine energy demand of program code and pinpoint energy faults, thereby integrating seamlessly into existing software development environments. As part of PEEK we have designed a lightweight, yet powerful electronic measuring device capable of taking automated, analog energy measurements. Results show an up to 8.4-fold speed-up of energy analysis when using PEEK, while the energy consumption of the analyzed code was improved by 25.3%.