Modeling power consumption for DVFS policies

Power-aware management strategies are a trend towards achieving energy-efficient computing environments. One of the approaches behind those strategies is dynamic frequency and voltage scaling (DVFS). Since frequency adjustments may have a negative impact on system performance, users often have to experiment with these policies to find the optimal configuration for their application and energy reduction goals. While the performance impact can be easily measured by the total execution time of an application, power consumption measurements require additional logging and frequently external equipment. The following paper presents a mathematical model to help users estimate the power consumption of their application when using different DVFS policies. A preliminary evaluation shows that the model has 94% accuracy when compared against real-time measurements.