How to Increase Energy Efficiency with a Single Linux Command

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that using a simple Linux command to set power caps can significantly improve energy efficiency in servers, outperforming traditional thermal and performance-focused settings with minimal performance impact.

Contribution

It shows that power capping via a single Linux command is an effective, accessible method to enhance energy efficiency without modifying existing power management mechanisms.

Findings

Energy efficiency improved by up to 25% using power caps.

Power capping achieves this with minimal performance loss.

Simple Linux command implementation is effective and accessible.

Abstract

Processors with dynamic power management provide a variety of settings to control energy efficiency. However, tuning these settings does not achieve optimal energy savings. We highlight how existing power capping mechanisms can address these limitations without requiring any changes to current power governors. We validate this approach using system measurements across a month-long data acquisition campaign from SPEC CPU 2017 benchmarks on a server-class system equipped with dual Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Our results indicate that setting a simple power cap can improve energy efficiency by up to 25% over traditional energy-saving system configurations with little performance loss, as most default settings focus on thermal regulation and performance rather than compute efficiency. Power capping is very accessible compared to other approaches, as it can be implemented with a single Linux command. Our results point to programmers and administrators using power caps as a primary mechanism to maintain significant energy efficiency while retaining acceptable performance, as opposed to deploying complex DVFS algorithms.