PowerAPI is a middleware toolkit for building software-defined power meters. Software-defined power meters are configurable software libraries that can estimate the power consumption of software in real-time. PowerAPI supports the acquisition of raw metrics from a wide diversity of sensors (eg., physical meters, processor interfaces, hardware counters, OS counters) and the delivery of power consumptions via different channels (including file system, network, web, graphical). As a middleware toolkit, PowerAPI offers the capability of assembling power meters «à la carte» to accommodate user requirements.

PowerAPI is an open-source project developed by the Spirals project-team, a joint research group between the University of Lille and Inria.

The documentation of the project is available here.

You can follow the latest news and asks questions by subscribing to our mailing list.

If you would like to contribute code you can do so through GitHub by forking the repository and sending a pull request.

When submitting code, please make every effort to follow existing conventions and style in order to keep the code as readable as possible.

• PowerAPI: A Python framework for building software-defined power meters: G. Fieni, D. Romero Acero, P. Rust, R. Rouvoy. Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). The Open Journal, June 2024.
• Evaluating the Impact of Java Virtual Machines on Energy Consumption: Z. Ournani, MC. Belgaid, R. Rouvoy, P. Rust, J. Penhoat. 15th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM). October 2021, Bari, Italy.
• SelfWatts: On-the-fly Selection of Performance Events to Optimize Software-defined Power Meters: G. Fieni, R. Rouvoy, L. Seiturier. 20th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGRID 2021). May 2021, Melbourne, Australia.
• SmartWatts: Self-Calibrating Software-Defined Power Meter for Containers: G. Fieni, R. Rouvoy, L. Seiturier. 20th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGRID 2020). May 2020, Melbourne, Australia.
• Taming Energy Consumption Variations in Systems Benchmarking: Z. Ournani, MC. Belgaid, R. Rouvoy, P. Rust, J. Penhoat, L. Seinturier. 11th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE'2020). April 2020, Edmonton, Canada.
• The Next 700 CPU Power Models: M. Colmant, R. Rouvoy, M. Kurpicz, A. Sobe, P. Felber, L. Seinturier. Elsevier Journal of Systems and Software (JSS). 144(10):382-396, Elsevier.
• WattsKit: Software-Defined Power Monitoring of Distributed Systems: M. Colmant, P. Felber, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGrid). April 2017, Spain, France. pp.1-14.
• Process-level Power Estimation in VM-based Systems: M. Colmant, M. Kurpicz, L. Huertas, R. Rouvoy, P. Felber, A. Sobe. European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys). April 2015, Bordeaux, France. pp.1-14.
• Monitoring Energy Hotspots in Software: A. Noureddine, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. Journal of Automated Software Engineering, Springer, 2015, pp.1-42.
• Unit Testing of Energy Consumption of Software Libraries: A. Noureddine, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. International Symposium On Applied Computing (SAC), March 2014, Gyeongju, South Korea. pp.1200-1205.
• Informatique : Des logiciels mis au vert: L. Seinturier, R. Rouvoy. J'innove en Nord Pas de Calais, NFID, 2013.
• PowerAPI: A Software Library to Monitor the Energy Consumed at the Process-Level: A. Bourdon, A. Noureddine, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. ERCIM News, Special Theme: Smart Energy Systems, 92, pp.43-44. ERCIM, 2013.
• Mesurer la consommation en énergie des logiciels avec précision: A. Bourdon, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. 01 Business & Technologies, 2013.
• A review of energy measurement approaches: A. Noureddine, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, ACM, 2013, 47 (3), pp.42-49.
• Runtime Monitoring of Software Energy Hotspots: A. Noureddine, A. Bourdon, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), September 2012, Essen, Germany. pp.160-169.
• A Preliminary Study of the Impact of Software Engineering on GreenIT: A. Noureddine, A. Bourdon, R. Rouvoy, L. Seinturier. International Workshop on Green and Sustainable Software (GREENS), June 2012, Zurich, Switzerland. pp.21-27.

PowerAPI is used in a variety of projects to address key challenges of GreenIT:

• SmartWatts is a self-adaptive power meter that can estimate the energy consumption of software containers in real-time.
• GenPack provides a container scheduling strategy to minimize the energy footprint of cloud infrastructures.
• VirtualWatts provides process-level power estimation of applications running in virtual machines.
• Web Energy Archive ranks popular websites based on the energy footpring they imposes to browsers.
• Greenspector optimises the power consumption of software by identifying potential energy leaks in the source code.

Currently, PowerAPI is used in two research projects:

• Distiller ANR Project that searches to reduce energy consumption of Cloud applications.
• Défi Pulse studies how to valorize emissions from High Performance Computing (HPC) using as use case Qarnot Computing's offers.

PowerAPI is licensed under the BSD-3-Clause License. See the LICENSE file for details.