Modeling and Decoupling the GPU Power Consumption for Cross-Domain DVFS

Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) is a popular technique to improve the energy-efficiency of high-performance computing systems. It allows placing the devices into lower performance states when the computational demands are lower, opening the possibility for significant power/energy savings. This work presents a GPU power consumption model, used to predict the GPU power consumption of any application at different frequency levels. To obtain this model, an estimation algorithm is proposed, relying on careful benchmarking of the GPU architecture. The model can estimate the contribution of twelve different GPU components (FP32-ADD/MUL/FMA, FP64-ADD/MUL/FMA, INT, SF, CF units, shared memory, L2-cache, and DRAM) to the GPU power consumption. Different model use cases are evaluated (fixed-frequency, DVFS, and scaling-factors), which can obtain both the total or the per-component GPU power consumption. A technique to export models to a distinct GPU from the one it was estimated on is also proposed. These approaches were extensively validated on five different GPUs from the three most recent microarchitectures with a set of 42 standard benchmarks, achieving very accurate predictions. In particular, the scaling-factor power model achieves an average prediction error of 3.5 percent (Titan Xp), 4.6 percent (GTX Titan X), 3.1 percent (GTX 980) and 2.4 percent (Tesla K40c).