Estimating Operating System Process Energy Consumption in Real Time

The power consumption in data centers due to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) is significant across the globe. With recent developments in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), we notice a paradigm shift in computing. Desktops (PCs) and laptops are being replaced by smart phones and tablets. A major impact of this architecture is a shift of computing resources from personal desktops and laptops to centralized server farms. This implies increases in power consumption in the large-scale servers used in these infrastructures. In such a scenario, optimizing the IT resources for power consumption is a necessity. The first step of such an optimization at the application level is the knowledge of how much energy the application is consuming. A major challenge in this domain is to develop a software-based energy metering tool that can measure the energy consumptions at the OS process level. We have developed an OS process-level power metering tool that can accurately estimate the energy usage based on system resource usages, and demonstrated that our tool provides energy measurement for complex e-business applications with greater than 95% accuracy.