EnergyVis: Interactively Tracking and Exploring Energy Consumption for ML Models

TL;DR

EnergyVis is an interactive visualization tool designed to help researchers track, compare, and optimize the energy consumption and carbon footprint of machine learning models across different hardware and deployment options.

Contribution

It introduces a novel interactive system with coordinated views for monitoring and reducing ML models' energy use and carbon emissions.

Findings

Enables interactive comparison of energy consumption metrics.

Highlights energy-intensive training phases for optimization.

Supports exploration of sustainable deployment options.

Abstract

The advent of larger machine learning (ML) models have improved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in various modeling tasks, ranging from computer vision to natural language. As ML models continue increasing in size, so does their respective energy consumption and computational requirements. However, the methods for tracking, reporting, and comparing energy consumption remain limited. We presentEnergyVis, an interactive energy consumption tracker for ML models. Consisting of multiple coordinated views, EnergyVis enables researchers to interactively track, visualize and compare model energy consumption across key energy consumption and carbon footprint metrics (kWh and CO2), helping users explore alternative deployment locations and hardware that may reduce carbon footprints. EnergyVis aims to raise awareness concerning computational sustainability by interactively highlighting excessive energy usage during model training; and by providing alternative training options to reduce energy usage.