TR-2014-11
A Quantitative Evaluation of the RAPL Power Control System
Huazhe Zhang; Henry Hoffmann. 21 May, 2014.
Communicated by Henry Hoffmann.
Abstract
\begin{abstract}
We evaluate Intel's RAPL power control system, which allows users to
set a power limit and then tunes processor behavior to respect that
limit. We evaluate RAPL by setting power limits and running a
number of standard benchmarks. We quantify RAPL along five metrics:
stability, accuracy, settling time, overshoot, and efficiency. The
first four are standard measures for evaluating control systems.
The last recognizes that any power control approach should deliver
the highest possible performance achievable within the power limit.
Our results show that RAPL performs well on the four standard
metrics, but some benchmarks fail to achieve maximum performance. At
high power limits, the average performance is within 90\% of
optimal. At middle power limits, it is 86\% of optimal. At low
power limits, the average performance is less than 65\% of optimal.
\end{abstract}
Original Document
The original document is available in PDF (uploaded 21 May, 2014 by
Henry Hoffmann).
