Ampehre: An Open Source Measurement Framework for Heterogeneous Compute Nodes

Profiling applications on a heterogeneous compute node is challenging since the way to retrieve data from the resources and interpret them varies between resource types and manufacturers. This holds especially true for measuring the energy consumption. In this paper we present Ampehre, a novel open source measurement framework that allows developers to gather comparable measurements from heterogeneous compute nodes, e.g., nodes comprising CPU, GPU, and FPGA. We explain the architecture of Ampehre and detail the measurement process on the example of energy measurements on CPU and GPU. To characterize the probing effect, we quantitatively analyze the trade-off between the accuracy of measurements and the CPU load imposed by Ampehre. Based on this analysis, we are able to specify reasonable combinations of sampling periods for the different resource types of a compute node.