DNPC: A Dynamic Node-Level Power Capping Library for Scientific Applications

As the race to exa-scale computing accerlerates, power consumption continues to be a critical challenge. While several technologies are available for power management, balancing energy efficiency and application performance during execution remains an important topic of research. In this study, we develop an open-source library called DNPC for dynamically controlling an application's package-level poewr consumption during execution. Given a specific sperformance degradation threshold, DNPC aims to minimize power consumption by following the application's power profile and adjusting the power cap accordingly. Further, DNPC is able to estimate the online performance of an application under capping, and predict its estimed performance degradation relative to an uncapped run. In this paper, we present an overview of the library, followed by a case study to illustrate the use of DNPC with an Exascale Computing Project proxy application on a production supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory.