IMTeract Tool for Monitoring and Profiling HPC Systems and Applications

Energy usage of computing equipment is an important consideration and energy inefficiency of computer systems is identified as the single biggest obstacle to advances in computing. Research into low-energy computing products ranges from operating system codes, applications and energy-aware schedulers to cooling systems for data centres. To monitor energy consumption in data and HPC centres it is necessary to develop tools for measuring the energy usage of computer equipment and applications. We have developed power measuring apparatus and a tool, IMTeract, for measuring energy consumption of HPC applications. IMTeract was used for energy usage profiling of HPC clusters running FLUENT and DL-POLY software and a GPU cluster running different implementations of an FFT algorithm. Our experimental results are encouraging and suggest that the IMTeract tool can be used to measure the CPU, Memory, Disk I/O and Network I/O for an application or a process and report on the energy used.