How to measure power consumed by my algorithm?

Question

I have an image processing algorithm running on an ARM-Cortex-A8/Ubuntu 9.01 platform and I have to measure the power consumed by my algorithm, does anyone know how to do this? Any tools available for this?

Answer 1

Strictly speaking your algorithm doesn't consume power.

Presumably you have some hardware which can accurately measure the power usage of the device, so you should just be able to repeatedly run your code (on an otherwise idle device) on various test data sets and measure the cumulative power usage, and compare that with the idle power consumption of the device over the same time; the difference would be the amount of additional juice the device used running your code.

Like any kind of benchmark, you'll need to run it repeatedly in a loop to get accurate data.

As the data may change its performance characteristics, you'll need a corpus of different test data to simulate different use-cases. Talk to your QA team about it.

Answer 2

I think u can try POWERTOP and POWERSTAT and measure once while system is idle and once while running your program and difference might give you the necessary information.

http://www.hecticgeek.com/2012/02/powerstat-power-calculator-ubuntu-linux/

Thanks--

S Teja