arXiv subjects

Deepak Panigrahy

Publications and source records attributed to Deepak Panigrahy.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Understanding the Energy Cost of Quantized Agents on Shared GPUs

Quantization can lower the energy of language-model calls and free memory for serving more agents, but its benefit per completed task remains unclear when agents share a GPU. Measurements of fixed requests or isolated agents leave open how the agents' generated work interact with competition for compute and cache. We present a systematic study of precision and admission limits for two agent models on A100 deployments with 40 or 80 GB of memory, using coding and data-analysis tasks with independently verified outcomes. We replay recorded calls across precisions to isolate execution energy and cap the cache to test the value of freed memory. For both models with four admitted agents where requests fit in the cache, 4-bit weights with 16-bit activations execute the same calls with 10-25% less energy than 8-bit weights and activations. Despite this saving, extra work and fewer completions in live runs raise their energy per verified completion by 49%. Where requests compete for cache on the 40 GB deployment, 4-bit weights cost less, and capping their cache raises energy per verified completion by 34% with 16 agents. These results show how generated work and cache demand change the energy benefit of quantization, providing a practical basis for choosing precision and admission limits together.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2026

Measuring the Energy Cost of Completing Tasks with Quantized Language-Model Agents

Quantization reduces the memory and energy needed to serve large language models (LLMs) and AI agents for coding and data analysis can now run on locally hosted LLMs. In practice, this benefit is commonly benchmarked per output token. Yet an agent calls its model repeatedly, runs tools, and revises its work, and quantization can change both how much the agent generates and whether it succeeds. Existing energy studies either compare quantized models on single requests or measure agents at one fixed precision, overlooking how a change in precision plays out across a complete agent task. To address this gap, this paper presents the first characterization of the task-level energy trade-offs of model quantization in locally hosted agents. We develop 29 agent tasks with automatic pass/fail checks in six families, ranging from single-answer SQL analytics to multi-step repository bug fixing, and measure CPU and GPU energy per output token and per completed task for 4-bit and 8-bit versions of two open-weight models on bare-metal NVIDIA A100 nodes with llama$.$cpp. Our findings reveal that 4-bit precision generally saves energy per token, though whether it saves energy per completed task is task dependent and changes with the model and the execution budget (i.e., limits on turns, tokens, and time). We trace this discrepancy to the extra tokens needed to complete a task in full, which translates into using up to 3.5 times as much energy per completed task. These findings offer actionable guidance for developers and operators choosing model precision for agents, showing how tokens per completed task, set against the per-token saving, reveal whether lower precision completes the work with less energy.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2026

Energy per Successful Goal: Goal-Level Energy Accounting for Agentic AI Systems

Current AI energy benchmarks measure consumption per model invocation. For agentic systems, where a single user goal may trigger multistep orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure recovery, the invocation count is an implementation artifact rather than a task property, and per inference normalization misrepresents the energy cost of completing a goal. We present A-LEMS (Agentic LLM Energy Measurement System), a cross layer framework that redefines the unit of AI energy accounting as Energy per Successful Goal (EpG): total workflow energy across all attempts, including failures and retries, divided by successfully completed goals. A-LEMS combines a temporal boundary model, a five layer attribution pipeline mapping hardware signals (RAPL on x86; SPBM and DCGM on ARM) to workflow energy, and a reproducibility protocol binding every measurement to hardware, environment, and runtime configuration. Building on EpG, we define the Orchestration Overhead Index (OOI), the ratio of agentic to linear EpG on matched goals under identical success criteria. Across nine task families on Intel x86 and NVIDIA Grace GB10 ARM, CPU only OOI ranges 0.35x to 11.07x. Including GPU dynamic energy, which accounts for 83.8% of agentic EpG in local inference, widens this to 0.4x to 26.48x, so CPU only measurement understates overhead about twofold for reasoning tasks. For remote inference, network wait energy shifts OOI from 2.5x to 2.35x. The overhead arises from orchestration structure (planning, retries, recovery) that induces additional inference calls, not from costlier individual calls. The metric is not biased upward: single tool calculator dispatch inverts to OOI = 0.61x (95% CI [0.35, 0.97]) on x86. Goal level accounting via EpG and OOI provides a measurement foundation for benchmarking agentic AI.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

The Energy Blind Spot: NVIDIA's Flagship Edge AI Hardware Cannot Support Process-Level Energy Attribution

Agentic AI workloads - where a single user goal triggers multi-step orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure recovery - are being targeted for edge deployment, with NVIDIA, Dell, HP, ASUS, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte all shipping GB10-based desktop AI systems in 2026. Prior work shows orchestration structure dominates agentic energy cost and CPU-side processing accounts for up to 44% of total dynamic energy. We report a systematic energy-observability audit of the ASUS Ascent GX10 (GB10 SoC) and find that the platform exposes no CPU energy counter, no INA power-rail monitor, no IPMI/BMC, and no SCMI powercap protocol through any supported software interface. The only on-device energy telemetry is instantaneous GPU power via NVML. We further discover that the MediaTek firmware already computes per-rail energy internally via an undocumented ACPI interface (SPBM), but NVIDIA states there are "no plans to expose CPU rail information." On-device per-process energy attribution - as performed on x86 via RAPL - is therefore not reproducible on this platform through supported interfaces. We formalize a hardware requirements specification for energy-attributed AI, propose an interim calibration bridge for per-domain energy decomposition - confirmed on the Acer Veriton GN100 where CPU energy accumulators are live - and identify a standards-track path via SCMI powercap. Our findings motivate the low-carbon computing community to demand energy observability as a first-class hardware requirement.

cs.LG↗