Giuseppe Procaccianti

Understanding Green Software Development: A Conceptual Framework

The energy efficiency of IT has become one of the hottest topics in the last few years. The problem has been typically addressed by hardware manufacturers and designers, but recently the attention of industry and academia has shifted to the role of software for IT sustainability. Writing energy-efficient software is one of the most challenging issues in this area, because it requires not only a change of mindset for software developers and designers but also models and tools to measure and reduce the effect of software on the energy consumption of the underlying hardware. In this article, the authors present a conceptual framework that provides a unifying view of the strategies, models, and tools available so far for designing and developing greener software.

Green Architectural Tactics for the Cloud

Energy efficiency is a primary concern for the ICT sector. In particular, the widespread adoption of cloud computing technologies has drawn attention to the massive energy consumption of data centers. Although hardware constantly improves with respect to energy efficiency, this should also be a main concern for software. In previous work we analyzed the literature and elicited a set of techniques for addressing energy efficiency in cloud-based software architectures. In this work we codified these techniques in the form of Green Architectural Tactics. These tactics will help architects extend their design reasoning towards energy efficiency and to apply reusable solutions for greener software.

Profiling power consumption on desktop computer systems

Background. Energy awareness in the ICT has become an important issue: ICT is both a key player in energy efficiency, and a power drainer. Focusing on software, recent work suggested the existence of a relationship between power consumption, software configuration and usage patterns in computer systems. Aim. The aim of this work was collecting and analysing power consumption data of a general-purpose computer system, simulating common usage scenarios, in order to extract a power consumption profile for each scenario. Methods. We selected a desktop system running Windows XP as a test machine. Meanwhile, we developed 11 usage scenarios, classified by their functionality, and automated by a GUI testing tool. Then, we conducted several test runs of the scenarios, collecting power consumption data by means of a power meter. Results. Our analysis resulted in an estimation of a power consumption value for each scenario and software application used, obtaining that each single scenario introduced an overhead from 2 to 11 Watts, corresponding to an increase of about 12%. Conclusions. We determined that software and its usage patterns impacts consistently on the power consumption of computer systems. Further work will be devoted to evaluate how power consumption is affected by the usage of specific system resources, like processors, disks, memory etc.

The green lab: experimentation in software energy efficiency

Software energy efficiency is a research topic where experimentation is widely adopted. Nevertheless, current studies and research approaches struggle to find generalizable findings that can be used to build a consistent knowledge base for energy-efficient software. To this end, we will discuss how to combine the traditional hypothesis-driven (top-down) approach with a bottom-up discovery approach. In this technical briefing, participants will learn the challenges that characterize the research in software energy efficiency. They will experience the complexity in this field and its implications for experimentation.

A Catalogue of Green Architectural Tactics for the Cloud

Energy efficiency is a primary concern for the ICTsector. In particular, the widespread adoption of cloud computing technologies has drawn attention to the massive energy consumption of data centers. Although hardware constantly improves with respect to energy efficiency, this should also be a main concern for software. In previous work we analyzed the literature and elicited a set of techniques for addressing energy efficiency in cloud-based software architectures. In this work we codified these techniques in the form of Green Architectural Tactics. These tactics will help architects extend their design reasoning towards energy efficiency and to apply reusable solutions for greener software.

Architecture Strategies for Cyber-Foraging: Preliminary Results from a Systematic Literature Review

Mobile devices have become for many the preferred way of interacting with the Internet, social media and the enterprise. However, mobile devices still do not have the computing power and battery life that will allow them to perform effectively over long periods of time or for executing applications that require extensive communication or computation, or low latency. Cyber-foraging is a technique to enable mobile devices to extend their computing power and storage by offloading computation or data to more powerful servers located in the cloud or in single-hop proximity. This paper presents the preliminary results of a systematic literature review (SLR) on architectures that support cyber-foraging. The preliminary results show that this is an area with many opportunities for research that will enable cyber-foraging solutions to become widely adopted as a way to support the mobile applications of the present and the future.

Software energy profiling: comparing releases of a software product

In the quest for energy efficiency of Information and Communication Technology, so far research has mostly focused on the role of hardware. However, as hardware technology becomes more sophisticated, the role of software becomes crucial. Recently, the impact of software on energy consumption has been acknowledged as significant by researchers in software engineering. In spite of that, measuring the energy consumption of software has proven to be a challenge, due to the large number of variables that need to be controlled to obtain reliable measurements. Due to cost and time constraints, many software product organizations are unable to effectively measure the energy consumption of software. This prevents them to be in control over the energy efficiency of their products. In this paper, we propose a software energy profiling method to reliably compare the energy consumed by a software product across different releases, from the perspective of a software organization. Our method allows to attribute differences in energy consumption to changes in the software. We validate our profiling method through an empirical experiment on two consecutive releases of a commercial software product. We demonstrate how the method can be applied by organizations and provide an analysis of the software related changes in energy consumption. Our results show that, despite a lack of precise measurements, energy consumption differences between releases of a software product can be quantified down to the level of individual processes. Additionally, the results provide insights on how specific software changes might affect energy consumption.

Energy Efficiency in the ICT - Profiling Power Consumption in Desktop Computer Systems

Energy awareness in the ICT has become an important issue. Focusing on software, recent work suggested the existence of a relationship between power consumption, software configuration and usage patterns in computer systems. The aim of this work was collecting and analysing power consumption data of general-purpose computer systems, simulating common usage scenarios, in order to extract a power consumption profile for each scenario. We selected two desktop systems of different generations as test machines. Meanwhile, we developed 11 usage scenarios, and conducted several test runs of them, collecting power consumption data by means of a power meter. Our analysis resulted in an estimation of a power consumption value for each scenario and software application used, obtaining that each single scenario introduced an overhead from 2 to 11 Watts, which corresponds to a percentage increase that can reach up to 20% on recent and more powerful systems. We determined that software and its usage patterns impact consistently on the power consumption of computer systems. Further work will be devoted to evaluate how power consumption is affected by the usage of specific system resources

Exploiting semantic technologies in smart environments and grids

Semantic technologies are currently spreading across several application domains as a reliable and consistent mean to address challenges related to organization, manipulation, visualization and exchange of data and knowledge. Different roles are actually played by these techniques depending on the application domain, on the timing constraints, on the distributed nature of applications, and so on. This paper provides an overview of the roles played by semantic technologies in the domain of smart grids and smart environments, with a particular focus on changes brought by such technologies in the adopted architectures, programming techniques and tools. Motivations driving the adoption of semantics in these different, but strictly intertwined, fields are introduced using a strong application-driven perspective. Two real-world case studies in smart grids and smart environments are presented to exemplify the roles covered by such technologies and the changes they fostered in software engineering processes. Learned lessons are then distilled and future adoption scenarios discussed. We provide an updated overview of roles played by semantic technologies in the smart environment and smart energy domain.We define general roles played by semantic technologies in these domains.We provide a case study on smart environments.We provide a case study on smart grids.We discuss the current and future landscape of semantic applications in the smart environment and smart grid domains.

On the presence of green and sustainable software engineering in higher education curricula

Nowadays, software is pervasive in our everyday lives. Its sustainability and environmental impact have become major factors to be considered in the development of software systems. Millennials–the newer generation of university students–are particularly keen to learn about and contribute to a more sustainable and green society. The need for training on green and sustainable topics in software engineering has been reflected in a number of recent studies. The goal of this paper is to get a first understanding of what is the current state of teaching sustainability in the software engineering community, what are the motivations behind the current state of teaching, and what can be done to improve it. To this end, we report the findings from a targeted survey of 33 academics on the presence of green and sustainable software engineering in higher education. The major findings from the collected data suggest that sustainability is under-represented in the curricula, while the current focus of teaching is on energy efficiency delivered through a fact-based approach. The reasons vary from lack of awareness, teaching material and suitable technologies, to the high effort required to teach sustainability. Finally, we provide recommendations for educators willing to teach sustainability in software engineering that can help to suit millennial students needs.