EACOF: A Framework for Providing Energy Transparency to enable Energy-Aware Software Development

Abstract

Making energy consumption data accessible to software developers is anessential step towards energy efficient software engineering. The presence ofvarious different, bespoke and incompatible, methods of instrumentation toobtain energy readings is currently limiting the widespread use of energy datain software development. This paper presents EACOF, a modular Energy-AwareComputing Framework that provides a layer of abstraction between sources ofenergy data and the applications that exploit them. EACOF replaces platformspecific instrumentation through two APIs - one accepts input to the frameworkwhile the other provides access to application software. This allows developersto profile their code for energy consumption in an easy and portable mannerusing simple API calls. We outline the design of our framework and providedetails of the API functionality. In a use case, where we investigate theimpact of data bit width on the energy consumption of various sortingalgorithms, we demonstrate that the data obtained using EACOF providesinteresting, sometimes counter-intuitive, insights. All the code is availableonline under an open source license. http://github.com/eaco