1,720,992 research outputs found
Energy-Efficient Software
Full text linkThe energy consumption of ICT is growing at an unprecedented pace. The main drivers for this growth are the widespread diffusion of mobile devices and the proliferation of datacenters, the most power-hungry IT facilities. In addition, it is predicted that the demand for ICT technologies and services will increase in the coming years. Finding solutions to decrease ICT energy footprint is and will be a top priority for researchers and professionals in the field. As a matter of fact, hardware technology has substantially improved throughout the years: modern ICT devices are definitely more energy efficient than their predecessors, in terms of performance per watt. However, as recent studies show, these improvements are not effectively reducing the growth rate of ICT energy consumption. This suggests that these devices are not used in an energy-efficient way. Hence, we have to look at software. Modern software applications are not designed and implemented with energy efficiency in mind. As hardware became more and more powerful (and cheaper), software developers were not concerned anymore with optimizing resource usage. Rather, they focused on providing additional features, adding layers of abstraction and complexity to their products. This ultimately resulted in bloated, slow software applications that waste hardware resources -- and consequently, energy. In this dissertation, the relationship between software behavior and hardware energy consumption is explored in detail. For this purpose, the abstraction levels of software are traversed upwards, from source code to architectural components. Empirical research methods and evidence-based software engineering approaches serve as a basis. First of all, this dissertation shows the relevance of software over energy consumption. Secondly, it gives examples of best practices and tactics that can be adopted to improve software energy efficiency, or design energy-efficient software from scratch. Finally, this knowledge is synthesized in a conceptual framework that gives the reader an overview of possible strategies for software energy efficiency, along with examples and suggestions for future researc
A Catalogue of Green Architectural Tactics for the Cloud
No full textEnergy 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
Four-Dimensional Sustainable E-Services
No full textE-services are not sustainable, unless we specifically design for sustainability along four dimensions (4D): economical, technical, environmental, and social. Economic sustainability to ensure that e-services create economic value; technical sustainability so that their technical assets actually enable the e-services to cope with changes; environmental sustainability to avoid that e-services harm the environment they operate in, and social sustainability to ensure e-services provide fair exchange of information between parties. Designing 4D-sustainable e-services is very complex. So far, service-engineering research has left dealing with such complexity unassisted—mainly due to the many initial technical challenges that needed to be overcome. Our goal is to fill this gap, by modeling the fundamentals of 4D-sustainable e-services.
We propose a conceptual approach for representing 4D-sustainability. Our goal is to enhance the shared understanding amongst sustainability stakeholders, and to ease sustainability assessment and negotiation. Our approach offers a number of interrelated core elements (common among the four sustainability dimensions) as well as dimension-specific elements, variable elements. By focusing on 4D core elements, we enable describing the essence of sustainable e-services in a unified manner. We illustrate the value of the conceptual model using a real-life case study featuring an airport baggage handling system
Architecture Strategies for Cyber-Foraging: Preliminary Results from a Systematic Literature Review
Full text linkMobile 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
Energy Efficiency in Cloud Software Architectures
Full text linkCloud-based software is often considered as providing a greener, more energy-efficient solution. At the same time, it introduces more complexity and demands for new investments in cloud services, technologies, and competencies for migration, maintenance, and evolution of the underlying software architectures. To understand better the implications of cloud software architectures on energy efficiency, in this paper we present the preliminary results of a systematic literature review that investigates what kind of software architectures for cloud service provisioning allow to achieve energy-efficient solutions
A systematic literature review on Energy Efficiency in Cloud Software Architectures
Full text linkCloud-based software architectures introduce more complexity and require new competences for migration, maintenance, and evolution.
Although cloud computing is often considered as an energy–efficient technology, the implications of cloud–based software on energy efficiency lack scientific evidence. At the same time, energy efficiency is becoming a crucial requirement for cloud service provisioning, as energy costs significantly contribute to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of a data center. In this paper, we present the results of a systematic literature review that investigates cloud software architectures addressing energy efficiency as a primary concern. The aim is to provide an analysis of the state-of-the-art in the field of energy-efficient software architectures
Economic Aspects of Green ICT
No full textEnvironmental concerns increasingly become a priority and a global issue. In spite of that, the major incentive for a company to go green is reducing costs and increase revenues. While green ICT practices mostly focus on environmental and technical issues, they barely address the implicit economic impact that they may have. This aspect is critical in the decision-making process for many researchers and practitioners that need to estimate upfront the financial impact of applying a practice. As a consequence, we believe users can minimize these issues by using the following two approaches: (i) a green model to visualize the business value exchanged between enterprises and end-users when applying a green strategy; and (ii) a system to calculate the cost savings that would be obtained when applying a green practice on a pre-existing ICT solution. In this chapter, we propose using the e3value technique to model and perform trade-off analysis among alternative green practices, particularly from an economic perspective. Moreover, we have designed and implemented a Web-based software tool that enables to analyze and calculate the direct and indirect economic impact of a practice before it is adopted in production. These two approaches are the first step towards calculating how much green ICT costs, and motivating organizations to reuse green ICT solutions based on informed decisions
Profiling Power Consumption on Mobile Devices
Full text linkThe proliferation of mobile devices, and the migration of the information access paradigm to mobile platforms, motivate studies of power consumption behaviors with the purpose of increasing the device battery life. The aim of this work is to profile the power consumption of a Samsung Galaxy I7500 and a Samsung Nexus S, in order to understand how such feature has evolved over the years. We performed two experiments: the first one measures consumption for a set of usage scenarios, which represent common daily user activities, while the second one analyzes a context-aware application with a known source code. The first experiment shows that the most recent device in terms of OS and hardware components shows significantly lower consumption than the least recent one. The second experiment shows that the impact of different configurations of the same application causes a different power consumption behavior on both smartphones. Our results show that hardware improvements and energy-aware software applications greatly impact the energy efficiency of mobile devices
Understanding Green Software Development: A Conceptual Framework
Full text linkThe 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 softwar
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