A Roofline Model of Energy

Subject area: High-Performance ComputingWe 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