Updated PTDaemon Interface Meets Today's Industry Needs

By Klaus-Dieter Lange, SPECpower Committee Chair

I'm pleased to announce a recent update to the PTDaemon interface. SPEC benchmarks play an increasingly important role in energy efficiency and sustainability initiatives because they enable computer vendors, enterprises, and government entities to accurately measure energy consumption by computing systems and data centers. The PTDaemon interface makes it easier for SPEC benchmarks to measure power and temperature by providing a common TCP/IP-based interface that can be integrated into different benchmark harnesses. This allows power measurement devices to be automatically incorporated into performance evaluation software and eliminates the need for users to understand and adapt to different power analyzer interface protocols and behaviors.

The new version of the PTDaemon interface includes multi-channel support for the ZES LMG 450/500/600 families of power analyzers. It also includes support for TFA Dostmann and Cleware USB temperature sensors on Linux-based systems. Other enhancements include:

• Detection and invalidation of high crest factor current readings for multiple power analyzers
• Minor bug fixes for Hioki and Newton's 4th devices
• Enhanced handling of Yokogawa WT33x power analyzer accuracy

These enhancements enable more organizations to use SPEC benchmarks and other tools for more use cases related to increasing energy efficiency, achieving a low carbon footprint, and implementing new cooling technologies. The SPEC benchmarks and tools using PTDaemon include SPECpower_ssj 2008, SPECvirt_sc 2013, SPEC CPU 2017, the Server Efficiency Rating Tool (SERT) Suite, and Chauffeur WDK. The interface is also used in benchmarks created by MLCommons and the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC).

In addition to facilitating power and temperature benchmarking, the PTDaemon interface offloads control of the power analyzer or temperature sensor to a system other than the one under test. Offloading the measurements to a system other than the system under test ensures that any overhead due to recording measurements does not disrupt the execution of the workload.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)

The new version of PTDaemon is especially important for benchmarking low-power ML systems, some of which are prone to causing high current crest factors, which can add extra stress to the electrical grid. PTDaemon supports the ability to measure power and energy consumption at different levels of ML performance across workloads, enabling the benchmarking of ML inference and training systems. This will enable the creation of more energy-efficient AI algorithms and ML systems.

The PTDaemon interface is developed and maintained by the SPECpower Committee, which includes representatives from AMD, Ampere, Dell, HPE, IBM, Intel, IEIT, Microsoft, the University of Würzburg, and veteran benchmark developers Greg Darnell and Hansfried Block.

Available for immediate download

Users of the SPECpower_ssj 2008 benchmark and the SERT suite are encouraged to apply the update using the SPEC updater tool.

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