A Practical Model for Evaluating the Energy Efficiency of Software Applications

Abstract

Abstract-Evaluating the energy efficiency of software applications currently is an ad-hoc affair, since no practical and widely applicable model exists for this purpose. The need for such an evaluation model is pressing given the sharp increase in energy demand generated by the ICT industry. In particular, we need to get in control of our software applications since they play a key role in driving the consumption of energy. This paper proposes ME 3 SA, a Model for Evaluating the Energy Efficiency of Software Applications. ME 3 SA provides a practical breakdown of energy efficiency into measurements that can be applied to software applications in relation to the quantity of work they deliver. This approach makes it possible to measure and control energy efficiency similar to other software qualities such as performance efficiency or maintainability.Furthermore, we report on a case study in which the model was applied to an operational software system of the Software Improvement Group (SIG), a software advisory firm based in the Netherlands. The case study provides evidence that the proposed model is able to identify energy consumption hotspots and efficiency bottlenecks within software applications.

Framing sustainability as a property of software quality

“…They increasingly focus on energy efficiency as an objective of the software-development life cycle and related development tools and methodologies. In 2014, Kalaitzoglou et al 16 developed a practical evaluation model that could serve as a method for evaluating the energy efficiency of software applications.…”

La cara oculta de la sociedad de la información: el impacto medioambiental de la producción, el consumo y los residuos tecnológicos

“…De momento, el cómo evaluar ese impacto es un objeto de estudio en sí mismo (Malmodin et al, 2014;Kalaitzoglou, Bruntink, & Visser, 2014). Algunos trabajos apuestan por una visión más general del impacto del mundo digital (Chowdhury, 2013;Hankel, 2014); otros estudian aspectos y/o dispositivos de forma específica, sean las comunicaciones móviles en su conjunto (Fehske, Fettweis, Malmodin & Biczók, 2011), las redes inalámbricas (Auer et al, 2012;Zeller et al, 2013), los centros de datos (Cappiello, Melià, Pernici, Plebani & Vitali, 2014) y sus "servidores comatosos o zombies" 11 (Koomey & Taylor, 2017), o el paso del uso de ordenadores de sobremesa a tabletas (Hischier & Wäger, 2014).…”

Extending software architecture views with an energy consumption perspective

“…considered on application level) instead of the inter-related elements it actually consists of (cf. [11,16]). A breakdown into hardware components and 'units of work' is made, but allocating EC to individual software modules has proven to be a difficult task [28].…”