ENTRA: Whole-Systems Energy Transparency

TL;DR

This paper introduces the ENTRA project’s concept of energy transparency, enabling software developers to estimate and optimize energy consumption at the software level through hardware energy modeling and static analysis.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach combining hardware energy modeling with static analysis to promote energy-aware software development.

Findings

Energy transparency enables understanding of software energy consumption without execution.

Static analysis combined with hardware models supports energy-aware programming.

The approach facilitates exploration of energy-efficient design choices.

Abstract

Promoting energy efficiency to a first class system design goal is an important research challenge. Although more energy-efficient hardware can be designed, it is software that controls the hardware; for a given system the potential for energy savings is likely to be much greater at the higher levels of abstraction in the system stack. Thus the greatest savings are expected from energy-aware software development, which is the vision of the EU ENTRA project. This article presents the concept of energy transparency as a foundation for energy-aware software development. We show how energy modelling of hardware is combined with static analysis to allow the programmer to understand the energy consumption of a program without executing it, thus enabling exploration of the design space taking energy into consideration. The paper concludes by summarising the current and future challenges identified in the ENTRA project.