Modeling Energy Consumption of Lock-Free Queue Implementations

Paper in proceeding, 2015

This paper considers the problem of modeling the energy behavior of lock-free concurrent queue data structures. Our main contribution is a way to model the energy behavior of lock-free queue implementations and parallel applications that use them. Focusing on steady state behavior we decompose energy behavior into throughput and power dissipation which can be modeled separately and later recombined into several useful metrics, such as energy per operation. Based on our models, instantiated from synthetic benchmark data, and using only a small amount of additional application specific information, energy and throughput predictions can be made for parallel applications that use the respective data structure implementation. To model throughput we propose a generic model for lock-free queue throughput behavior, based on a combination of the dequeuers' throughput and enqueuers' throughput. To model power dissipation we commonly split the contributions from the various computer components into static, activation and dynamic parts, where only the dynamic part depends on the actual instructions being executed. To instantiate the models a synthetic benchmark explores each queue implementation over the dimensions of processor frequency and number of threads. Finally, we show how to make predictions of application throughput and power dissipation for a parallel application using a lock-free queue requiring only a limited amount of information about the application work done between queue operations. Our case study on a Mandelbrot application shows convincing prediction results.