A new energy aware performance metric

Energy aware algorithms are the wave of the future. The development of exascale systems made it clear that extrapolations of current technologies, algorithmic practices and performance metrics are simply inadequate. The community reacted by introducing the FLOPS/WATT metric in order to promote energy awareness. In this work we take a step forward and argue what one should aim for is the total reduction of the spent energy in conjunction with minimization of time to solution. Thus, we propose to use f (time to solution) · energy (FTTSE) as the performance metric, where f (·) is an application dependent function of time. In this paper, we introduce our ideas and showcase them with a recently developed framework for solving large dense linear systems. © Springer-Verlag 2010.