Hardware Performance Counters ; Power measurement

[kandalla]

Hi,
I have a 4-node Intel Nehalem cluster and a 512 core Intel Clovertown cluster. I am interested in looking for some tools to measure the power consumed by parallel applications. I know that we can use external devices to measure and log power consumption. I would like to know if someone around here has some experience with any particular tool-kit. I would greatly appreciate it if someone can point me in the right direction.
I am also interested in looking at hardware counters to measure the power consumption. Do the Nehalems or the Clovertowns support any low-level counters for such purposes with little performance overheads?

Thanks in advance!

[Andres_M_Intel4]

OnLinux environments...

Have you tried powertop? It is a really interesting tool.
It works using several features only present on recent kernels toprovide an estimate using ACPI information.

How to get the tool and a lot more information on power consumption can be found at the following link.
http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/

Hope it helps you,

-- Andres

[kandalla]

Quoting - Andres More (Intel)

OnLinux environments...

Have you tried powertop? It is a really interesting tool.
It works using several features only present on recent kernels toprovide an estimate using ACPI information.

How to get the tool and a lot more information on power consumption can be found at the following link.
http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/

Hope it helps you,

-- Andres

Hi Andres,
Thanks for the post. I think the cluster that I use uses a slightly older kernel. I will have to check with the sys-admin about it.
Reg. the hardware counters, I actually came across a few papers that used hardware counters to monitor various CPU generated events and co-related them to the power consumption models for Pentium processors. I am surprised that I am not able to find anything concrete for Nehalem's or Clovertown's considering that these architectures are much more advanced.

Thanks,
Krishna