Overcoming Challenges in Scalable Power Monitoring with the Power API

Power will be a first-class operating constraint for Exascale computing. In order to manage power consumption of systems, measurement and control methods need to be developed. While several approaches have been developed by hardware manufacturers, they are vendor-specific and in some cases implementation-specific interfaces. Integrating all of the individual device level measurement and control functionality in a single system is a difficult task that requires system specific code. Sandia National Laboratories, in collaboration with many industry and academic partners, has developed a Power API specification, consisting of a broad range of interfaces spanning from low-level hardware to platform management and accounting. In order for many of the interfaces to be useful, especially at large scale, measurement data must be collected and control directives must be distributed in a scalable manner. This paper details the challenges of providing large scale power measurement and control and the scalable collection and control distribution architecture that is being integrated into the Power API reference implementation.