Fine-grained power management using process-level profiling

Low-power hardware design itself is not enough to solve the power problem of computer systems. Operating system level power saving strategies have been proved as effective complement to hardware methods. However, most of these strategies work on system level, and some of them may severely influence performance. In order to balance between performance and energy consumption, fine-grained methods, such as process-level power management, were proposed. These methods usually require realtime power information to make critical power-saving decisions, but most power profiling tools only supply component level power information. In this paper, we first propose a process-level power profiling tool called pTopW, which runs on Windows platform. pTopW supplies a group of APIs for power-aware system modules to acquire realtime power profiles and make power-aware decisions based on these information. In addition, we introduce a power-aware system module called EnergyGuard, which can eliminate energy wasted by abnormal-behavior applications. Through experiments, we found that the energy model we proposed have very good responsiveness. In addition, EnergyGuard is helpful to distinguish applications’ abnormal power behaviors.