Grech, Neville, Georgiou, Kyriakos, Pallister, James, Kerrison, Steve, Morse, Jeremy, and Eder, Kerstin (2015) Static analysis of energy consumption for LLVM IR programs. In: SCOPES '15: Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems. pp. 12-21. From: SCOPES '15: 18th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems, 1-3 June 2015, Sankt Goar, Germany.

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Abstract

Energy models can be constructed by characterizing the energy consumed when executing each instruction in a processor's instruction set. This can be used to determine how much energy is required to execute a sequence of assembly instructions, without the need to instrument or measure hardware.

However, statically analyzing low-level program structures is hard, and the gap between the high-level program structure and the low-level energy models needs to be bridged. We have developed techniques for performing a static analysis on the intermediate compiler representations of a program. Specifically, we target LLVM IR, a representation used by modern compilers, including Clang. Using these techniques we can automatically infer an estimate of the energy consumed when running a function under different platforms and compilers.

One of the challenges in doing so is that of determining the energy cost of executing LLVM IR program segments, for which we have developed two different approaches. When this information is used in conjunction with our analysis, we are able to infer energy formulae that characterize the energy consumption for a particular program. This approach can be applied to any languages targeting the LLVM toolchain, including C and XC or architectures such as ARM Cortex-M or XMOS xCORE, with a focus towards embedded platforms. Our techniques are validated on these platforms by comparing the static analysis results to the physical measurements taken from the hardware. Static energy consumption estimation enables energy-aware software development by providing instant feedback to the developer, without requiring simulations or hardware knowledge.

Item ID:	68080
Item Type:	Conference Item (Research - E1)
ISBN:	9781450335935
Copyright Information:	Copyright c© 2015 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc (ACM).
Date Deposited:	24 Mar 2025 23:25
FoR Codes:	46 INFORMATION AND COMPUTING SCIENCES > 4606 Distributed computing and systems software > 460606 Energy-efficient computing @ 34% 46 INFORMATION AND COMPUTING SCIENCES > 4612 Software engineering > 461208 Software testing, verification and validation @ 33% 46 INFORMATION AND COMPUTING SCIENCES > 4612 Software engineering > 461207 Software quality, processes and metrics @ 33%
SEO Codes:	17 ENERGY > 1701 Energy efficiency > 170102 Industrial energy efficiency @ 50% 22 INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION SERVICES > 2204 Information systems, technologies and services > 220404 Computer systems @ 50%
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