The Need for Power Debugging in the Multi-Core Environment

Debugging an application for power has a wide array of benefits ranging from minimizing the thermal hotspots to reducing the likelihood of CPU malfunction. In this work, we justify the need for power debugging, and show that performance debugging of a parallel application does not automatically guarantee power balance across multiple cores. We perform experiments and show our results using two case study benchmarks, Volrend from Splash-2 and Bodytrack from Parsec-1.0.