LLM-PowerTrace: A Dataset of Time-Resolved GPU Power Traces for AI Compute
Organizations: New York University, New York, NY, USA · University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada · Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
Abstract
AI compute is becoming large and fast-changing electrical loads. Its impacts on data center infrastructure and power grids depend not only on total energy consumption, but also on how their power draw moves over sub-second to minute timescales, including peaks, ramps, and synchronized fluctuations across accelerators. Existing energy benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) report aggregate quantities such as joules per token and rarely release the underlying time-series measurements, leaving these power dynamics poorly characterized and difficult to model. We introduce LLM-PowerTrace, an open dataset of time-resolved, per-GPU power traces for LLM fine-tuning and inference, sampled every 100,ms on varying NVIDIA platforms paired with complete workload and system metadata. For fine-tuning, LLM-PowerTrace profiles open model families spanning a wide range of model sizes and fine-tuning methods, together with controlled sweeps over batch size, sequence length, precision, parallelism, and checkpointing. For inference, it covers variations in concurrency, GPU frequency, KV-cache and weight quantization, prompt and output lengths, and request-arrival patterns. LLM-PowerTrace profiles a set of open model families across a wide range of model sizes, and controlled sweeps over batch size, sequence length, precision, parallelism, and checkpointing for fine-tuning, and it sweeps concurrency, GPU frequency, KV cache and weight quantization, prompt and output lengths, and request arrival patterns for inference. Built upon power traces, we define power-grid-facing metrics as well as AI-compute power&energy scaling law for extrapolating beyond the measured settings. Together, LLM-PowerTrace provides a dataset foundation for modeling, forecasting, and managing the fast-changing electrical behavior of AI compute.
Figures & tables
| Resource | Train | Infer | Power series | Per-GPU | Controlled | Resolution |
| Words to Watts ( Samsi et al., 2023 ) | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | aggregate |
| ML.ENERGY ( Chung et al., 2025 ) | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | aggregate |
| BurstGPT ( Wang et al., 2025 ) | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | request log |
| MIT Supercloud ( Samsi et al., 2021 ) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | 100 ms |
| LLM-PowerTrace (ours) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | 100 ms |
| Dimension | Fine-tuning subset | Inference subset |
| Observation unit | A fine-tuning execution with per-GPU traces and aggregate GPU power. | A serving execution with device telemetry and available request records. |
| GPU deployment | L40S, A100, H100, H200; four homogeneous GPUs per main-collection run. | A100, H100, H200; TP 1, 2, and 4 in designated configurations. |
| Models | Gemma, Llama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral/Mixtral; dense and MoE models. Model inventory in Table 5 . | Qwen3 dense models (0.6B–32B), Qwen3-30B-A3B MoE, and Llama-3.1-8B/70B. |
| Execution stack | Transformers and Accelerate; full fine-tuning, LoRA, QLoRA; DP or layer-wise MP. | vLLM 0.28.0; version 0.21.0 for the concurrency sweep. |
| Input workload | Alpaca instruction data, up to 52K examples, with common preprocessing in the main collection. | Controlled input/output lengths; chat, code, and math prompts; Poisson arrivals and BurstGPT replay. |
| Workload sweeps | Micro-batch ; sequence length ; model size and type. | Concurrency ; input/output lengths 128/128, 512/512, 2048/128, 512/2048, 2048/2048; thinking on/off in free generation. |
| Type | Input | Enters inference scaling law Eq. 5.2 as |
| Discrete | platform | (loaded idle power per GPU, measured), (power scale per GPU), (intercept) |
| TP | multiplies the per-GPU terms; divides in | |
| weight precision | shift in (FP8, INT4; 0 for BF16 and on A100) | |
| KV-cache precision | factor on (FP8; 1 for BF16) | |
| Linear in | model size | , in billions |
| running requests | , from the serving log |
Appendix figures & tables44 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| L40S | A100 | H100 | H200 | |
| Architecture | Ada Lovelace | Ampere | Hopper | Hopper |
| Memory | 48 GB GDDR6 | 80 GB HBM2e | 80 GB HBM3 | 141 GB HBM3e |
| Memory bandwidth | 864 GB/s | 2.04 TB/s | 3.35 TB/s | 4.8 TB/s |
| BF16 Tensor Core | 362 TFLOPS | 312 TFLOPS | 989 TFLOPS | 989 TFLOPS |
| Max. power limit | 350 W | 400 W | 700 W | 700 W |
| Inter-GPU link | PCIe (no NVLink) | NVLink 600 GB/s | NVLink 900 GB/s | NVLink 900 GB/s |
| Family | Generation | Model sizes (B) |
| Main fine-tuning collection | ||
| Gemma | Gemma | 2, 7 |
| Gemma 2 | 2, 9, 27 | |
| Gemma 3 | 0.27, 1, 4, 12, 27 | |
| Gemma 4 | E2, E4, 26(4), 31 | |
| Llama | Llama 2 | 7, 13, 70 |
| Parameter | Default | Parameter | Default |
| Node | 1 node, 4 identical GPUs | Learning rate | |
| Framework | Transformers + Accelerate | Warmup | 100 optimizer steps |
| Dataset | Alpaca, 52K samples | Gradient clipping | max norm 1.0 |
| Sequence length | 1,024 tokens | Attention | eager |
| Micro-batch size | 8 per process/sharded run | LoRA rank/scale/drop. | 64 / 16 / 0.05 |
| Grad. accumulation | 4 micro-steps | QLoRA quantization | 4-bit NF4, double |
| Layer | Factor | Primary trace manifestation |
| Workload | Fine-tuning method | Overall power profile and phase characteristics |
| Model scale | Power level and iteration duration | |
| Model architecture | Waveform morphology and temporal pattern | |
| Batch size | Micro-step duration and power level | |
| Sequence length | Forward/backward duration | |
| Numerical precision | Forward/backward power contrast and duration |
| Relation | Fitted law | |||
| Compute–energy | 0.992 | |||
| Batch size | 0.997 | |||
| Sequence length | 1.000 | |||
| Model size | 0.940 |
| Parameter | Default | Parameter | Default |
| Node | 1 node, 1 GPU (TP 1) | Request pattern | closed loop ( b32 ) |
| Engine | vLLM 0.28.0 | Max Batch Size | 32 |
| Batching | continuous | Output length | 512 tokens (EOS ignored) |
| Chunked prefill | on | Maximum context | 2,048 tokens (closed loop) |
| Prefix caching | on | Sampling | temperature 0.7, top- 0.9 ∗ |
| Weights / KV cache | BF16 / BF16 | Warm-up | 1 min before the window |
| Layer | Factor | Primary trace manifestation |
| Workload | Arrival process | Idle–busy switching; ramp magnitude |
| Concurrency limit | Power level until saturation; ramps peak mid-load | |
| Model scale | Power level and batch-turnover period | |
| Model architecture | Power level and cross-GPU balance | |
| Input length | Prefill share and proximity to the power limit | |
| Output length | Spacing of batch-turnover events |
| Candidate | Form | T1 | T2 | T3 | T4 | Primary | |
| Step 1, saturation (162 runs). T1: leave one model out. T2: 1–64 128–256 requests. | |||||||
| Power law | 5 | 0.222 | 0.256 | 0.239 | |||
| Power law, quadratic load | 6 | 0.216 | 0.301 | 0.259 | |||
| Saturating | 8 | 0.164 | 0.228 | 0.196 | |||
| Saturating, quadratic load | 9 | 0.107 | 0.114 | 0.110 | |||
| Floor plus rise | , two logistics | 12 | 0.110 | 0.120 | 0.115 | ||
| Level | Pairs | No term | Inside | On | Term kept | |
| KV cache FP8, all GPUs | 10 | 0.037 | 0.022 | 0.017 | 0.021 | |
| FP8 weights, H200 | 4 | 0.197 | 0.032 | 0.082 | 0.012 | |
| INT4 weights, H200 | 4 | 0.232 | 0.025 | 0.089 | 0.015 | |
| FP8 weights, A100 | 4 | 0.070 | 0.089 | 0.056 | 0.96 | none |
| INT4 weights, A100 | 4 | 0.097 | 0.074 | 0.068 | 0.60 | none |
| Symbol | Meaning | A100 | H100 | H200 | H100, locked clock |
| idle power per GPU (W) | 72.9 | 126.3 | 120.9 | 77.8 | |
| power scale per GPU (W) | 329 [318, 346] | 537 [509, 593] | 604 [583, 639] | shared with H100 | |
| intercept of | 1.99 [1.55, 2.21] | 1.32 [0.88, 1.50] | 1.47 [1.20, 1.68] | 5.53 [2.96, 238] | |
| Shared across all platforms | |||||
| model size per GPU | 0.598 [0.465, 0.666] | ||||
| load, linear | 0.749 [0.649, 0.823] | ||||
| Set | Median err (%) | Bias (%) | ||
| Mean power, fitted runs | 253 | 2.7 | 68% | |
| A100 FP8/INT4 weights (no term) | 8 | 4.3 | 62% | |
| Free-length generation | 9 | 4.6 | 78% | |
| Throttled clock (about 1830 MHz) | 3 | 1.3 | 67% | |
| Llama-3.1-70B, closed loop | 7 | 6.0 | 43% | |
| Poisson, 2-min segments, per-request log | 120 | 2.3 | 100% | – |
| Workload | Capacity | Power |
| Fixed length | 1.25 | 2.28 |
| Mooncake | 3.15 | 2.35 |
| Azure | 1.68 | 2.23 |
| Figure | Analysis | Factor / comparison | Content |
| Fig. 8 | Scaling-law calibration | FLOPs, batch size, sequence length, model size | Calibration of the fine-tuning-energy scaling law on H200 with QLoRA. |
| Fig. 9 | Scaling-law validation | Held-out parameter levels | Predicted versus measured energy per token under level-held-out validation. |
| Fig. 10 | Representative traces | MP vs. DP | Per-GPU and aggregate power under layer-wise model and data parallelism. |
| Fig. 11 | Representative traces | Batch size; sequence length | Changes in fine-tuning waveform and power level as workload dimensions increase. |
| Fig. 12 | Representative traces | Model size; dense vs. MoE | Effects of model scale and architecture on cycle duration and power profile. |
| Fig. 13 | Representative traces | Full, LoRA, QLoRA | Power-profile differences across fine-tuning methods. |
| Figure | Analysis | Factor / comparison | Content |
| Fig. 21 | Representative traces | Tensor-parallel degree | Per-GPU and node power of Qwen3-14B at TP 1, 2, and 4 on H100. |
| Fig. 22 | Representative traces | GPU platform | Qwen3-14B at TP 4 on A100, H100, and H200. |
| Fig. 23 | Representative traces | Arrival pattern | Steady and bursty BurstGPT replays of Qwen3-32B on two H200s. |
| Fig. 24 | Representative traces | Concurrency; input/output length | Segments across concurrency limits 1–256 (A100) and input/output pairs (H200). |
| Fig. 25 | Representative traces | Model size; dense vs. MoE | Qwen3-8B, 14B, 32B, and 30B-A3B on two H200s at TP 2. |
| Fig. 26 | Representative traces | Weight and KV-cache precision | BF16, FP8, and INT4 weights and an FP8 KV cache for Qwen3-14B on H100. |
| GPU | Model | TP1 | TP2 | TP4 |
| A100 | Qwen3-8B | 7.4 | 5.3 † | – |
| A100 | Qwen3-14B | 12.9 | 8.2 † | 5.3 |
| A100 | Qwen3-32B | 26.4 | 16.2 † | 9.7 |
| H100 | Qwen3-14B | 6.9 ‡ | 4.2 | 2.8 |
| H100 | Qwen3-32B | 14.3 ‡ | 8.3 | 5.0 |
| H200 | Qwen3-8B | 3.3 | 2.6 | – |
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Large language model inference studies how models generate outputs efficiently, reliably, and securely across hardware and workloads.
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