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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jelvani, Alborz, Martin, Richard P, Nagarakatte, Santosh
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16046
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author Jelvani, Alborz
Martin, Richard P
Nagarakatte, Santosh
author_facet Jelvani, Alborz
Martin, Richard P
Nagarakatte, Santosh
contents Processors with dynamic power management provide a variety of settings to control energy efficiency. However, tuning these settings does not achieve optimal energy savings. We highlight how existing power capping mechanisms can address these limitations without requiring any changes to current power governors. We validate this approach using system measurements across a month-long data acquisition campaign from SPEC CPU 2017 benchmarks on a server-class system equipped with dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Our results indicate that setting a simple power cap can improve energy efficiency by up to 25% over traditional energy-saving system configurations with little performance loss, as most default settings focus on thermal regulation and performance rather than compute efficiency. Power capping is very accessible compared to other approaches, as it can be implemented with a single Linux command. Our results point to programmers and administrators using power caps as a primary mechanism to maintain significant energy efficiency while retaining acceptable performance, as opposed to deploying complex DVFS algorithms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_16046
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How to Increase Energy Efficiency with a Single Linux Command
Jelvani, Alborz
Martin, Richard P
Nagarakatte, Santosh
Performance
Hardware Architecture
Processors with dynamic power management provide a variety of settings to control energy efficiency. However, tuning these settings does not achieve optimal energy savings. We highlight how existing power capping mechanisms can address these limitations without requiring any changes to current power governors. We validate this approach using system measurements across a month-long data acquisition campaign from SPEC CPU 2017 benchmarks on a server-class system equipped with dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Our results indicate that setting a simple power cap can improve energy efficiency by up to 25% over traditional energy-saving system configurations with little performance loss, as most default settings focus on thermal regulation and performance rather than compute efficiency. Power capping is very accessible compared to other approaches, as it can be implemented with a single Linux command. Our results point to programmers and administrators using power caps as a primary mechanism to maintain significant energy efficiency while retaining acceptable performance, as opposed to deploying complex DVFS algorithms.
title How to Increase Energy Efficiency with a Single Linux Command
topic Performance
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16046