Metrics for Energy-Aware Software Optimisation

Energy consumption is rapidly becoming a limiting factor in scientific computing. As a result, hardware manufacturers increasingly prioritise energy efficiency in their processor designs. Performance engineers are also beginning to explore software optimisation and hardware/software co-design as a means to reduce energy consumption. Energy efficiency metrics developed by the hardware community are often re-purposed to guide these software optimisation efforts. In this paper we argue that established metrics, and in particular those in the Energy Delay Product (Et) family, are unsuitable for energy-aware software optimisation. A good metric should provide meaningful values for a single experiment, allow fair comparison between experiments, and drive optimisation in a sensible direction. We show that Et metrics are unable to fulfil these basic requirements and present suitable alternatives for guiding energy-aware software optimisation. We finish with a practical demonstration of the utility of our proposed metrics.