SysPower: Unified System-Wide Power Estimation for Energy-Aware Computing

Abstract

Accurate estimation of real-time power consumption is essential for energy-efficient computing systems and data centers. Existing Linux interfaces expose power information for only a subset of hardware components and therefore do not provide a unified view of total system power consumption. We present SysPower, a user-space framework that estimates system-wide power consumption by combining measurements from hardware telemetry sources with lightweight models for uninstrumented components. Unlike infrastructure-level monitoring solutions that rely on dedicated hardware and primarily target infrastructure management, SysPower provides a realtime estimate of system-wide power consumption together with subsystem-level power contributions using interfaces commonly available on existing systems. The resulting estimates are directly accessible to application and system software at a latency suitable for runtime energy-aware decision making. Evaluation against wall meter measurements shows a mean estimation error of 7.5% across diverse workloads while improving estimation accuracy relative to representative existing tools. SysPower is publicly available at https://github.com/UOFL-CSL/syspower.