eess.SYOct 28, 2026

LLM-PowerTrace: A Dataset of Time-Resolved GPU Power Traces for AI Compute

Authors: Jiansheng Wang, Jaskeerat Singh, Haochen Xu, Xinyi Li, Mingyuan Yan, Shaohui Liu, Yuzhuo Li, Yize Chen, 

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

Appendix figures & tables44 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Jul 2, 2026

WattGPU: Predicting Inference Power and Latency on Unseen GPUs and LLMs

Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads are a rapidly growing contributor to data center energy consumption. Optimizing these deployments requires matching specific LLMs to the most efficient GPUs, but operators currently lack the tools to do so without exhaustively profiling each combination. While some predictive models exist, they still require profiling data and struggle to generalize to hardware unseen during training. To address this, we introduce WattGPU, featuring two predictive models for mean GPU power draw and Inter-Token Latency (ITL). Our approach leverages only publicly available LLM metadata and GPU specifications, eliminating the need for hardware access or profiling while enabling generalization to unseen NVIDIA server-grade GPUs and LLMs. We evaluate our models using rigorous leave-one-GPU-out and leave-one-LLM-out cross-validation on a dataset of 42 open-source LLMs (0.1B--27B parameters) and 8 GPUs under both offline and server scenarios. The mean power draw model achieves a median absolute percentage error of ≤3.4%\leq3.4\% for offline and ≤13.5%\leq13.5\% for server scenarios on unseen GPUs, while the latency model achieves ≤8.5%\leq8.5\% in server mode, both maintaining strong GPU ranking correlations for server scenarios (Kendall τ≥0.76τ\geq0.76). Compared to standard physically grounded baselines -- Load-Scaled Thermal Design Power (TDP) for power draw and roofline for latency -- our models reduce median absolute percentage error by approximately 4×\times on unseen LLM-GPU combinations for server scenarios or approximately 2×\times for completely unseen GPUs. WattGPU's data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/maufadel/wattgpu.
Apr 10, 2026

Watt Counts: Energy-Aware Benchmark for Sustainable LLM Inference on Heterogeneous GPU Architectures

While the large energy consumption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is recognized by the community, system operators lack guidance for energy-efficient LLM inference deployments that leverage energy trade-offs of heterogeneous hardware due to a lack of energy-aware benchmarks and data. In this work we address this gap with Watt Counts: the largest open-access dataset of energy consumption of LLMs, with over 5,000 experiments for 50 LLMs across 10 NVIDIA Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) in batch and server scenarios along with a reproducible, open-source benchmark that enables community submissions to expand this dataset. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct a system-level study of LLM inference across heterogeneous GPU architectures and show that GPU selection is crucial for energy efficiency outcomes and that optimal hardware choices vary significantly across models and deployment scenarios, demonstrating the critical importance of hardware-aware deployment in heterogeneous LLM systems. Guided by our data and insights, we show that practitioners can reduce energy consumption by up to 70% in server scenarios with negligible impact on user experience, and by up to 20% in batch scenarios.
May 20, 2026

PALS: Power-Aware LLM Serving for Mixture-of-Experts Models

Large language model (LLM) inference has become a dominant workload in modern data centers, driving significant GPU utilization and energy consumption. While prior systems optimize throughput and latency by batching, scheduling, and parallelism, they largely treat GPU power as a static constraint rather than a controllable resource. In this paper, we present a power-aware runtime for LLM serving, PALS, that treats GPU power caps as a first-class control knob and jointly optimizes them with software parameters such as batch size. The system combines lightweight offline power-performance models with a feedback-driven controller to select configurations that satisfy throughput targets while maximizing energy efficiency. We implement PALS within an existing LLM serving framework, vLLM, demonstrating that it requires no model retraining or API changes. Across multi-GPU systems and both dense and mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, PALS improves energy efficiency by up to 26.3%, reduces QoS violations by 4x to 7x under power constraints, and tracks dynamic power budgets. These results highlight the potential of integrating power control directly into LLM inference runtimes, enabling energy-proportional and grid-interactive AI systems.