Hwpc-Sensor

HardWare Performance Counter (HWPC) Sensor is a tool that monitor the Intel CPU performance counter and the power consumption of CPU.

Hwpc-sensor use the RAPL (Running Average Power Limit) technology to monitor CPU power consumption. This technology is only available on Intel Sandy Bridge architecture or higher.

The sensor use the perf API of the Linux kernel. It is only available on Linux and need to have root access to be used.

The sensor couldn’t be used in a virtual machine, it must access (via Linux kernel API) to the real CPU register to read performance counter values.

Installation

From docker

docker pull powerapi/hwpc-sensor

From deb file

Download the .deb file from the latest release

Install the sensor with sudo apt install hwpc-sensor-1.1.0.deb

Using the binary

You can use the compiled version of the sensor (available here)

Quickstart

For running the sensor, first we need a configuration. We provide an example bellow.

{
  "name": "sensor",
  "verbose": true,
  "frequency": 500,
  "output": {
    "type": "mongodb",
    "uri": "mongodb://127.0.0.1",
    "database": "db_sensor",
    "collection": "report_0"
  },
  "system": {
    "rapl": {
      "events": ["RAPL_ENERGY_PKG"],
      "monitoring_type": "MONITOR_ONE_CPU_PER_SOCKET"
    },
    "msr": {
      "events": ["TSC", "APERF", "MPERF"]
    }
  },
  "container": {
    "core": {
      "events": [
        "CPU_CLK_THREAD_UNHALTED:REF_P",
        "CPU_CLK_THREAD_UNHALTED:THREAD_P",
        "LLC_MISSES",
        "INSTRUCTIONS_RETIRED"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Start a mongo db and then you can start the sensor with the following command line, depending on your installation :

• from docker : docker run --rm --net=host --privileged --pid=host -v /sys:/sys -v /var/lib/docker/containers:/var/lib/docker/containers:ro -v /tmp/powerapi-sensor-reporting:/reporting -v $(pwd):/srv -v $(pwd)/config_file.json:/config_file.json powerapi/hwpc-sensor --config-file /config_file.json
• from binary : ./hwpc-sensor --config-file config_file.json

The reports will be provided in your mongodb.