SelfWatts: On-the-fly Selection of Performance Events to Optimize Software-defined Power Meters

Fine-grained power monitoring of software-defined infrastructures is unavoidable to maximize the power usage efficiency of data centers. However, the design of the underlying power models that estimate the power consumption of the monitored software components keeps being a long and fragile process that remains tightly coupled to the host machine and prevents a wider adoption by the industry beyond the rich literature on this topic. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces SELFWATTS: a lightweight power monitoring system that explores and selects the relevant performance events to automatically optimize the power models to the underlying architecture. Unlike state-of-the-art techniques, SELFWATTS does not require any a priori training phase or specific hardware to configure the power models and can be deployed on a wide range of machines, including heterogeneous environments.