Study of the Processor and Memory Power and Energy Consumption of Coupled Sparse/Dense Solvers

In the aeronautical industry, aeroacoustics is used to model the propagation of acoustic waves in air flows enveloping an aircraft in flight. This for instance allows one to simulate the noise produced at ground level by an aircraft during the takeoff and landing phases, in order to validate that the regulatory environmental standards are met. Unlike most other complex physics simulations, the method resorts to solving coupled sparse/dense systems. In a previous work, the authors proposed two classes of algorithms for solving such large systems on a relatively small multi-core workstation based on compression techniques and showed their positive impact on time to solution and memory usage. Within a multi-metric experimental study presented in this paper, we establish that this translates to the power and energy consumption as well. Moreover, because of the nature of the problem, coupling dense and sparse matrices, and the underlying solution methods, including dense, sparse direct and compression steps, the experiments yield an interesting processor and memory power profile to share with the community and which we analyze in details.