ApplicationPowerManager

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Introduction

Wanting to find out how much power does a program need to run? Current tools such as Intel Power Gadget only measure the power usage or your computer, but not your program. ApplicationPowerManager solves your problem by allowing you to estimate the power usage of one application.

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Acknowledgement

ApplicationPowerManager use EnergyLib64.dll provided by Intel Power Gadget.

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Setting up and getting started

Setting up

1. Make sure you have Python version 3.9 or later installed.
2. Download the zip file in the latest release into a new folder, unzip it and run ApplicationPowerManager.py to run the ApplicationPowerManager
   1. One way to run is open terminal at current folder, run using command python ApplicationPowerManager.py
   2. Measuring without charging in action (for laptop user) might produce more correct result.

Using the application

1. Upon running the ApplicationPowerManager, you will see the message Please wait a moment....
2. After a few seconds, a new message will appear Now run the application you want to measure the power usage. and a confirmation is required Have you run it? (yes/no)
3. Now you need to run the application you want to measure.
4. Confirming your application is running by replying yes
5. Wait and see the result.

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Design

Overview

ApplicationPowerManager retrieves and calculates difference of power usage before and after you run the application you want to measure and output the estimation of power usage required.

Implementation

init:

Load the Intel Power Gadget library EnergyLib64.dll and initialize it.

generate_report:

Use API from EnergyLib64.dll to measure the average power usage when calling ReadSample() and save into specified csv file.

main:

1. Before you run the application you want to measure, measure the power usage and save into PowerGadgetLogBefore.csv.
2. After confirming you have run the application you want to measure, measure the power usage again and save into PowerGadgetLogAfter.csv.
3. Retrieving the Average Processer Power and calculate the difference.
   1. Result output might be a message that says the result is 0 or there is an error somewhere. You need to run the application again.

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Current drawbacks

1. ApplicationPowerManager only provides the estimation, and may generate different result if there is a background application that end or start during measuring and logging PowerGadgetLogAfter.csv, so multiple try should be done to obtain the closet estimation (run the ApplicationPowerManager multiple time and record the result, afterwards decide the closet estimation).
   • For example after running ApplicationPowerManager multiple times and obtains results 2.23, 1.97, 2.4, 5.52, 0.99 we can see that the estimation would be around 2.2 with values 5.52 and 0.99 be the outliner.
2. Result output might be a message that says the result is 0 or there is an error somewhere, it might be caused by another application using a greater amount of power end during the estimating. You have to run the application again in this case.