Improving the energy efficiency of MPI applications by means of malleability

This work presents two novel techniques for increasing the energy efficiency of parallel applications by means of malleability. These techniques are implemented as an extension of Flex-MPI, a library implemented on top of MPI, which provides performance-aware dynamic reconfiguration for MPI-based applications. During the application execution, Flex-MPI performs energy and performance monitoring by means of energy and performance counters. It leverages this information in order to adapt the program performance using two energy policies: energy minimization and performance-per-watt maximization. The evaluation results show that these new energy-aware capabilities permit MPI applications to be executed in an optimized way both in terms of performance and energy efficiency.