Event
Alumnus Talk: Prof. Vince Weaver, "The Challenge of Measuring Power on Modern Computing Systems"
Friday, October 7, 2016
11:30 a.m.
AVW 2460
Bill Churma
301 405 0680
churma@umd.edu
Title: The Challenge of Measuring Power on Modern Computing Systems
Abstract: Power and Energy consumption have become key metrics in modern computing systems, but obtaining actual measurements remains difficult. At one design extreme — embedded systems — energy use has always been important, especially in mobile devices such as cellphones. At the other extreme, large supercomputers, machines can draw more power than small cities, and small per-node energy savings can quickly add up to millions of dollars in reduced electricity and cooling costs. In order to optimize systems and code for energy use, detailed fine-grained energy readings are needed, but obtaining such readings can be complex.
My research group investigates the power consumption of the components that make up modern computing devices, including CPUs, DRAM, hard drives, GPUs, USB, and motherboard. These measurements are often intrusive and require expensive equipment, but our goal is to design a small, simple, low-cost device capable of providing detailed power measurements to normal users. We also use our infrastructure to validate various estimated power methodologies, including the running-average power limit (RAPL) available on recent Intel processors. I will describe the results of those validations, as well as the various challenges encountered while conducting detailed energy measurement.
Bio: Vince Weaver obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2000. He went on to work at a startup that made tablet PCs; this lasted until the dot-com crash of 2001. After a brief time spent writing web interfaces for legacy Fortran models, he decided to go to grad school. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2010. He then spent two years as a post-doctoral researcher at the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he worked on the widely-used PAPI performance analysis library. Currently he is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maine.
His research interests include hardware performance counters, system call fuzzing, embedded systems, high performance computing, and operating systems. He's the author of the Linux perf_event_open() manpage, was the winner of the "Most Beauteous Visuals" award in the 2005 International Obfuscated C Code Competition, and also is responsible for many hacks involving Raspberry Pi boards, LED displays and obsolete 1980s sound chips.
