A portable interface for runtime energy monitoring

Abstract

As energy consumption becomes a first class concern for computing systems, there is an increasing need for application-level access to runtime power/energy measurements. To support this need, a growing number of power and energy monitors are being developed, each with their own interfaces. In fact, the approaches are extremely diverse, and porting energy-aware code to new platforms with new hardware can involve significant rewriting effort. To reduce this effort and support portable, application-level energy monitoring, a common interface is needed. In this paper, we propose EnergyMon, a portable application interface that is independent of underlying power/energy data sources. We demonstrate EnergyMon's flexibility with two case studies -- energy-aware profiling and self-adaptive systems, each of which requires monitoring energy across a range of hardware from different manufacturers. We release the EnergyMon interface, implementations, utilities, and Java and Rust bindings and abstractions as open source.