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pTop:
A
Process-Level Power
Profiling Tool
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Motivation
Our Approach
People
Publications
Software
News:
pTopW
(pTop for
Windows
platforms)
and two energy-aware applications : EnergyGuard and BatteryLife, have
been released on April 5, 2011, you can download the sourcecode from
here.
Join the pTop
community group for further
discussions.
Motivation
Energy profiling plays a
crucial role in order to apply
efficient energy optimization in the application level, therefore
improving energy efficiency. Knowing the quantity of energy consumed by
a particular application is very important in adapting the application
behavior in order to obtain specific goals, such as extending the
battery life time of a mobile device or charging for services in the
cloud computing system.
However, current solutions
to the energy profiling problem
exhibit some drawbacks that make them difficult to be used widely.
First, they are mainly hardware-based, i.e., they require additional
multimeters reading the current along the wire between the system and
its power supply. This approach is expensive, inflexible, and difficult
to deploy. Second, the energy profiling information is provided
offline, after collecting, analyzing and correlating trace of system
activities, therefore making it difficult for applications to adapt
their behavior at runtime. Finally, energy profiling is not offered as
a service in the system. Without such service, system developers would
face difficulty when implementing energy-ware adaptation protocols to
obtain energy optimization.
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Our
Approach
Motivated by the need for an efficient energy profiling tool, in this
project, we design and implement pTop (a.k.a. power top), a
process-level
energy profiling tool, with many features to improve energy efficiency.
Being a service of the operating system, pTop runs at the kernel level
and provides energy consumption data from all applications and
processes running in the systems. pTop is software-based, requires no
additional hardware, therefore, is easy to be applied in various
platforms with different hardware configurations. Additionally, pTop is
lightweight, thus, will not affect the performance of other
applications. Moreover, the most interesting feature of pTop is
supporting two convenient user interfaces: a set
of well-defined energy-aware application programming interfaces (API)
and performance counters. Any process can call these APIs to acquire
the energy
consumption in terms of different energy consuming components in the
last specified time period. We envision that these APIs will play an
important role in making more energy on-line/real-time adapting and
scheduling decisions in both mobile devices and cloud computing
environments.
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People
Hui Chen
Youhuizi
Li
Thanh Do
(former member)
Suhib Rawshdeh (former member)
Dr.
Weisong Shi
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Publications
- Hui Chen, Youhuizi Li
and Weisong Shi, Fine-Grained Power
Management Using Process-level Profiling, accepted by
Sustainable Computing: Informatics and Systems, Jan. 2012.
- Hui Chen, Shinan Wang
and Weisong Shi, Where Does the
Power Go in a Computer System: Experimental Analysis and Implications,
PMP 2011, July 2011.
- Hui Chen and Weisong
Shi, Power
Measurement and Profiling: State-of-the-Art, Handbook on
Energy-Aware and Green Computing, edited by Ishfaq Ahmad and Sanjay
Ranka, Chapman and Hall/CRC Press Taylor and Francis Group LLC. Early
2011.
- Thanh Do, Suhib
Rawshdeh and Weisong Shi, pTop:
A
Process-level Power Profiling Tool,
in Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Power Aware Computing and Systems
(HotPower'09), Big Sky, MT, October 10, 2009.
- Hanping Lufei and
Weisong Shi, Energy-Aware
QoS for Application Sessions across Multiple Protocol Domains in Mobile
Computing, Computer Networks
(COMNET), Vol. 51, No. 11, 3125-3141,
August 2007.
- Hanping Lufei and
Weisong Shi, e-QoS:
Energy-aware QoS for Application Sessions Across Multiple Protocol
Domains in Mobile Computing,
in Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on
Quality-of-Service in Wired/Wireless Networks (QShine 2006), Waterloo,
Canada, August 7-9, 2006.
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Software
- pTopW (pTop for Windows
platforms)
and two energy-aware applications : EnergyGuard and BatteryLife, have
been released on April 5, 2011, you can download the sourcecode from here.
We hope that your
could feed
back your configuration file and
the setup of your experimet
platform to us, which will be very helpful to our further version and
help others.
- The pTop 1.0 (linux
version) has been
officially released on March 15, 2010, you can download it
from SourceForge.
- Please join the pTop
community group
at http://groups.google.com/group/ptop-mist to receive the latest news
about pTop and discuss
with others.
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