Energy consumption analysis of programs based on XMOS ISA-level models

Abstract

Energy consumption analysis of embedded programs requires the analysis of low-level program representations. This is challenging because the gap between the high-level program structure and the lowlevel energy models needs to be bridged. Here, we describe techniques for recreating the structure of low-level programs and transforming these into Horn clauses in order to make use of a generic resource analysis framework (CiaoPP). Our analysis, which makes use of an energy model we produce for the underlying hardware, characterises the energy consumption of the program, and returns energy formulae parametrised by the size of the input data. We have performed an initial experimental assessment and obtained encouraging results when comparing the statically inferred formulae to direct energy measurements from the hardware running a set of benchmarks. Static energy estimation has applications in program optimisation and enables more energy-awareness in software development.