FaceBook's HipHop Software Efficiency

Haiping Zhao has a great blog entry showcasing how Facebook has been able to improve the efficiency of their applications through the development of HipHop for PHP. Simply stated, HipHop transforms PHP code into optimized C++ code. According to Zhao, this technology reduced the average CPU utilization on their servers by 50%.

This showcases two things in particular:

• Software can have a major impact on system efficiency. Even relatively good solutions like PHP can still be improved.
• Metrics that look only at hardware-centric criteria often ignore the benefits of more efficient software.

This second bullet merits further elaboration. Administrators looking at CPU utilization as an approximation of total server work accomplished would erroneously assume their servers were only doing half as much work with HipHop than they were beforehand, even though they would be doing the same amount of work with better software, just doing it more efficiently.

Future posts will talk about ways to measure useful work.

--kb

Good IBM doc on cpufreq

Previous posts have talked about power management in Linux, including information about the cpufreq module. IBM has published a good document explaining many aspects of how to use the cpufreq module. This document is worth a look.

Intel® Energy Checker SDK Released

For nearly the last two years, I've been working with a colleague named Jamel Tayeb to develop a tool that could be used to help measure the energy efficiency of software (and data centers as an aggregate measure). I'm happy to say that the Intel® Energy Checker SDK has now finally gone public and is available for download from http://whatif.intel.com.

Most of the technology world's focus regarding energy efficiency has focused on hardware: better processors, better memory, better disks, better power conversion, etc. This is good, but it overlooks the substantial contribution that better software can make towards improving energy efficiency. An automobile driver who drives over the top of a hill may use more energy than someone who drives around the hill; software designed with energy efficiency in mind may use a different algorithm than a brute force approach that seems simpler at first.

The Intel® Energy Checker SDK provides developers and systems integrators a simple API that they can use to measure the amount of "useful work" performed by the system and then correlate the useful work with energy consumption. The useful work is not the number of instructions executed, cycles retired, or the average CPU utilization--that's not why you buy software. For example, you buy e-mail software to do things like send e-mails, so the measures of useful work can be the number of messages sent, the number of kilobytes in those messages sent, the number of messages received, and the number of kilobytes in those messages received. Software developers can choose what measures of useful work they export and how often they choose to export this information.

The SDK includes tools to measure the rate of power usage and to measure/calculate energy consumption over time. The SDK supports several external power meters as well as the ability to read energy consumption directly from power supplies having certain levels of instrumentation.

The software developer can easily aggregate/weight the work done in their application(s) with work done in other instrumented applications and compare that to the energy consumed by the system or systems under test to determine energy efficiency. This is an important step towards making software more energy efficient and may lead towards energy-aware algorithms in leading software packages. In turn, this will help administrators measure the aggregate useful work of their facilities, rather than simply measuring hardware-centric metrics that actually penalize more efficient software.

The SDK is available free of charge (and without royalties) from http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-energy-checker-sdk/. The SDK supports Windows, Linux, Solaris 10, and MacOS X. Source code for the core API and many utilities is included, though Intel distributes some utilities in binary form only. Check it out!

--kb