What do programmers know about the energy consumption of software?

Abstract

Traditionally, programmers have received a wide range of training on programming languages and methodologies, but rarely about software energy consumption. Yet, the popularity of mobile devices and cloud computing require increased awareness about software energy consumption. On a mobile device, computation is often limited by the battery life. Under the demands of cloud computing, data centers struggle to reduce energy consumption through virtualization and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) systems. Efficient energy consumption of software is increasingly becoming an important non-functional requirement for programmers. However, are programmers knowledgeable enough about software energy consumption? Do programmers base their implementation decision on popular beliefs? In this article, we survey over 100 programmers for their knowledge of software energy consumption. We find that programmers have limited knowledge about energy efficiency, lack knowledge about the best practices to reduce energy consumption of software, and are often unsure about how software consumes energy. Education about the importance of energy effective software will benefit the programmers. Our results highlight the need for training about energy consumption and efficiency.

A Resource Utilization Score for Software Energy Consumption

“…The metrics for the radar chart were '% CPU time' (CPU), 'available MBytes' (memory), '% disk idle time' (hard disk), 'power consumption' (in Watt) and the 'total Bytes per second' (network). Compared to Systester the network metric was included and and its range was determined using Lan Speed Test 7 . In this case an architectural change was applied to make Document Generator multi-threaded.…”

“…In a recent study, Hindle [5] presents a method to analyze EC across releases of software products, which provides a basis for sustainable endeavors a software producing organization [6] might undertake. Despite this, organizations still struggle with addressing the software products in terms of their EC [7].…”

“…how should a specific (performance) measurement or metric be interpreted, and that the key findings that require further investigation are difficult to identify. Issues that are strengthened by developer knowledge that is lacking in this area [7]. As a result, we had developers and software architects searching for the right information and identified a potential inhibiting factor to start addressing the EC of the software.…”

Self-Adaptive Energy-Efficent Applications: The HADAS Developing Approach

“…They rarely address energy efficiency as some recent studies show [3,4], principally due to a lack of appropriate methodologies and tools which would help them to produce self-adaptable green software at runtime. Therefore, although software energy efficiency is becoming increasingly important, development processes of self-greening systems supported by tools are still in their infancy.…”

“…Although software systems do not directly consume energy, they strongly affect the energy consumption of the hardware [2]. So developers should be more aware of the energy consumed by these systems during their usage, and try to develop energy-efficient applications that adapt their behavior to minimize the energy consumed during their execution, i.e., develop self-greening applications [3,4].…”