Predicting Power Consumption of High-Memory-Bandwidth Workloads

High performance workloads with high bandwidth memory utilization are among the most power consuming software applications. When writing such applications, developers can directly influence power consumption of the final software through their choice of data size and traversal method, mostly due to caching characteristics. Explicit knowledge on how choices influence power consumption can thus lead to greater overall energy efficiency. In existing work, power prediction for memory accesses and high bandwidth applications requires either detailed measurement information on the system on which the software is executed or it is too generic, not taking significant aspects, such as caching and data size into account. In this paper, we propose a power model that bridges this gap by modeling power consumption based on concrete software properties, while considering hardware characteristics on a more abstract level, characterizing it primarily using publicly available data. The model is designed to enable developers to compare power consumption of implementation alternatives for high memory bandwidth software components. We validate our model by measuring modified versions of the high bandwidth benchmark stream. We show that our model can predict the relative change of power consumption due to implementation changes and the power consumption of a concrete system under test with an average error of 19 percent.