Univariate Interpolation-based Modeling of Power and Performance

Abstract

Performance and power scale non-linearly with device utilization, making characterization and prediction of energy efficiency at a given load level a challenging issue. A common approach to address this problem is the creation of power or performance state tables for a pre-measured subset of all possible system states. Approaches to determine performance and power for a state not included in the measured subset use simple interpolation, such as nearest neighbor interpolation, or define state switching rules. This leads to a loss in accuracy, as unmeasured system states are not considered. In this paper, we compare different interpolation functions and automatically configure and select functions for a given domain or measurement set. We evaluate our approach by comparing interpolation of measurement data subsets against power and performance measurements on a commodity server. We show that for non-extrapolating models interpolation is significantly more accurate than regression, with our automatically configured interpolation function improving modeling accuracy up to 43.6%.