EMO: Energy Efficiency Modeling and Optimization for AI Workloads

Abstract

The massive energy consumption of GPU-accelerated AI workloads challenges sustainable computing. We observe that execution asynchrony (e.g., CPU-GPU, concurrent streams, multi-GPU) creates slack, allowing non-critical kernels to run at lower frequencies to save energy without impacting end-to-end latency. However, existing approaches fail to simultaneously achieve workload generality and fine-grained slack discovery, while high-fidelity modeling incurs prohibitive overhead. We present EMO, a lightweight framework exploiting these fine-grained opportunities. First, to identify where to optimize, EMO constructs a low-level dependency graph capturing asynchrony and performs what-if timing analysis to precisely identify slack windows. Second, to determine how to optimize, EMO introduces dependency-aware kernel packing. It aggregates kernels to preserve critical paths while collapsing redundant details, enabling high-fidelity latency-energy modeling with minimal profiling cost. Finally, EMO combines graph analysis and pack-level models to formulate energy optimization as a constrained combinatorial problem, efficiently solving for optimal frequency policies under given latency targets. Evaluations show EMO reduces energy consumption by 15%--28% with only 2%--5% performance loss and negligible overhead.