A Simple Model for Estimating Power Consumption of a Multicore Server System

Balancing the performance and the energy consumption of the servers is one of the important issues in large-scale computing infrastructure such as data centers. Measuring or accurately estimating power consumption of a server is one of the most fundamental and enabling technologies for enhancing energy efficiency of a server because how the server consumes the supplied power is essential for constructing a power management policy. For the purpose, power models for server systems have been extensively studied. However, most of existing works are too complex to be used real-time, because gathering the data for estimating the power consumption causes much overhead. In this paper, we propose a simple power model for a multicore server. Our model is simple enough to gather only four parameters: operating frequency, the number of active cores, the number of cache accesses and the number of the last level cache misses. We show our model is simple but relatively accurate by experiments that show the model has over 90% accuracy.