PowerDPDK: Software-Based Real-Time Power Measurement for DPDK Applications

Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) provides a set of libraries for fast packet processing that allow applications in the user space to directly interact with the NIC. Currently, DPDK provides a power management library that enables the applications to save power. However, it lacks features to effectively measure the power consumption of the system. In this paper we propose PowerDPDK, a software-based real-time library to measure the power consumption of DPDK applications. PowerDPDK leverages the Running Average Power Limit (RAPL) feature available on modern Intel processors to provide the power consumed by the CPU package and DRAM. We discuss the architecture of PowerDPDK and describe the process to incorporate it into DPDK applications. Subsequently, we use PowerDPDK to measure the power consumption of a few sample DPDK applications and a chain of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) in OpenNetVM, a high-performance container-based platform for Network Function Virtualization (NFV). We show that a major share of the power consumed by DPDK is due to the use of Poll Mode Drivers (PMD), and hence, even a simple Layer 2 forwarding application consumes a large amount of power.