Add "Cite as" for citation in scientific papers

[tstrempel]

Problem

Your software can solve a lot of problems when it comes to measuring energy. This is especially interesting in an scientific context as a relatively platform independent way of measuring energy consumption. You are currently missing a good citation field.

Solution

Provide a citation in the most common formats (e.g. BibTex), so it is possible to cite the work your team does correctly.

Additional context

If there are any, please also provide a link to technical/white papers.
Did you also validate the measured power consumption or is the validity a given due to the used underlying technology?
Are very fine measurements (every 100 nanoseconds) possible via -n without compromising validity?

[bpetit]

Hi. Thanks a lot for the interest for the project.

I know bibtext only as a consumer of scientific papers and I'm not really used to scientific citations mechanisms and usage. Thanks for highlighting that possibility.

First a quick debrief on the accurateness and limits of scaphandre (as I'm writing):
Scaphandre relies on RAPL so far, which gives the power consumption of CPU and RAM, in a pretty precise manner (there are papers about that out there, and very promising research ongoing). So some of the power consumption of the machine is not accounted (disks, netword card, fans, ...). This is supposed to be a minor part of the power consumption but the documentation on that is still sparse and it still has to be kept in mind (especially if you run GPU intensive workloads or use the machine mainly as a storage node with a lot of disks). We intend to extend the reach of scaphandre's metrics in the future (surely starting with GPUs). There is also to precise that we don't (and probably won't) take the power supply loss into account, as this is not something we could not easily know from the software. As a summary scaphandre is (as far as I can tell right now) pretty accurate for a common usage of a server (web, IT, infrastructure services, email, ...). For more specific use cases, it certainly lacks features.

Are very fine measurements (every 100 nanoseconds) possible via -n without compromising validity?

I'm not sure about that, I have to check at which frequency the data we collect from rapl is really refreshed. A step of 0.1 second is fine for sure (the data seems to refresh quicker than that), below I have to check. I can add a comment on that thread about that when I get the information for sure.

To go back on the first topic, I'm curious, how do you think the reference would be used for ? Would it be used to say something like "this software may help on getting data or comparing different scenarii" ?

[tstrempel]

It would go like this: To measure the energy usage of program x scaphandre [1] is used, because ...

Where [1] is the entry in the references. It helps to get promising software circulating and honors the developers. As good tools for measuring energy are almost non-existent, it is good to give your project some possible publicity. I am currently writing my master thesis on a topic relating to energy consumption and wanted to use scaphandre for that, because it can separate the energy consumption of processes from each other.

Containing to the frequency of data collection, a similar project (https://github.com/sosy-lab/cpu-energy-meter) uses range in the tens of milliseconds, so pretty much in the same frame as this project

[tstrempel]

Or just use something like this:

Cite as

<main_author> et al., Scaphandre. https://github.com/hubblo-org/scaphandre

The BibTex entry would look like this. If you provide the authors, most people can glue together a bibtex entry themselves, so there is no real need for different entries in different cite styles, as I first proposed.

@software{scaphandre,
  author       = {<main_author> and
                  <side_author> and
                  <side_author> and
                  <side_author>},
  title        = {scaphandre},
  year         = 2021,
  version      = {v0.2},
  url          = {https://github.com/hubblo-org/scaphandre}
}

[bpetit]

Containing to the frequency of data collection, a similar project (https://github.com/sosy-lab/cpu-energy-meter) uses range in the tens of milliseconds, so pretty much in the same frame as this project

I'll have a look at this project, thanks !

Thanks for the explanations. Would a CITATION file be a good place for this ? I mean, is this where most people would search for such a snippet ?

[bpetit]

Is it okay like this ? https://github.com/hubblo-org/scaphandre/blob/main/CITATION

[tstrempel]

Yeah perfect, sry for not answering sooner

[bpetit]

Great, no worries and thank you for the hint !