WattScope: Non-intrusive Application-level Power Disaggregation in Datacenters

Xiaoding Guan, Noman Bashir, David E. Irwin, Prashant J. Shenoy

Abstract: WattScope is a system for non-intrusively estimating the power consumption of individual applications using external measurements of a server's aggregate power usage and without requiring direct access to the server's operating system or applications. Our key insight is that, based on an analysis of production traces, the power characteristics of datacenter workloads, e.g., low variability, low magnitude, and high periodicity, are highly amenable to disaggregation of a server's total power consumption into application-specific values. WattScope adapts and extends a machine learning-based technique for disaggregating building power and applies it to server- and rack-level power measurements that are already available in datacenters. We evaluate WattScope's accuracy on a production workload and show that it yields high accuracy, e.g., often <∼10% normalized mean absolute error, and is thus a potentially useful tool for datacenters in externally monitoring application-level power usage.