Towards an energy-aware scientific I/O interface

摘要

Intelligently switching energy saving modes of CPUs, NICs and disks is mandatory to reduce the energy consumption. Hardware and operating system have a limited perspective of future performance demands, thus automatic control is suboptimal. However, it is tedious for a developer to control the hardware by himself. In this paper we propose an extension of an existing I/O interface which on the one hand is easy to use and on the other hand could steer energy saving modes more efficiently. Furthermore, the proposed modifications are beneficial for performance analysis and provide even more information to the I/O library to improve performance. When a user annotates the program with the proposed interface, I/O, communication and computation phases are labeled by the developer. Run-time behavior is then characterized for each phase, this knowledge could be then exploited by the new library.