Energy Benchmarking Tool

The energy benchmarking Rust crate can be added to your project with cargo add energy-bench. The tool is continuously being updated, so please make sure you are using the most recent version.

Tool for benchmarking the energy consumption of programs. Idle energy consumption, as well as energy consumed by data generation and cleanup, are subtracted from the results.

Check out the example folder for a few examples, and check the .gitlab-ci.yml for an example of how to run the Software Energy Lab pipeline.

Some programs are too short-running to provide accurate energy measurements. To avoid this, the benchmark can be repeated until a given amount of time has passed: set_min_measurement_duration. By default, benchmarks are run for at least 100ms.

RAPL permissions (Debian)

If you want to run this locally, you will likely need elevated permissions for reading RAPL energy data.

I suggest adding a new rapl group.

sudo addgroup rapl
sudo usermod -aG rapl $(whoami)

And then adding entries to /etc/sysfs.conf for your RAPL domains and subdomains. Check your folder hierarchy in /sys/class/powercap/ to determine which domains you have available to your CPU.

Then for each domain, add the following lines to /etc/sysfs.conf. (Requires sysfsutils to be installed.)

For example, for package 0:

mode class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/energy_uj = 0440
owner class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/energy_uj = root:rapl

And for its first subdomain:

mode class/powercap/intel-rapl:0:0/energy_uj = 0440
owner class/powercap/intel-rapl:0:0/energy_uj = root:rapl

Finally, restart the sysfsutils service.

sudo systemctl restart sysfsutils

RAPL permissions (Arch)

These instructions should be distribution-invariant and even work on Debian-based distributions, I think.

1. Create and edit the following file: sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/99-powercap.rules
2. Put the following into the file: ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="powercap", KERNEL=="intel-rapl:0", RUN+="/bin/chmod 644 /sys/class/powercap/%k/energy_uj"
3. Reload udev rules: sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
4. Trigger the rule: sudo udevadm trigger --verbose --subsystem-match=powercap --action=add
5. Check if the rule worked (you should have read permissions for the file): ls -la /sys/class/powercap/intel-rapl:0/energy_uj

The reason we're doing it this way is because permission changes applied to /sys/ get reset on reboot, so this is a way to make the permission change persistent.