A Roofline Model of Energy
Abstract
We describe an energy-based analogue of the time-based roofline model
of Williams, Waterman, and Patterson (Comm. ACM, 2009). Our goal is
to explain—in simple, analytic terms accessible to algorithm designers
and performance tuners—how the time, energy, and power to execute
an algorithm relate. The model considers an algorithm in terms of operations,
concurrency, and memory traffic; and a machine in terms of
the time and energy costs per operation or per word of communication.
We confirm the basic form of the model experimentally. From
this model, we suggest under what conditions we ought to expect an
algorithmic time-energy trade-off, and show how algorithm properties
may help inform power management.