3,126 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
Definition, implementation and validation of energy code smells: an exploratory study on an embedded system
Full text linkOptimizing software in terms of energy efficiency is one of the challenges that both research and industry will have to face in the next few years.We consider energy efficiency as a software product quality characteristic, to be improved through the refactoring of appropriate code pattern: the aim of this work is identifying those code patterns, hereby defined as Energy Code Smells, that might increase the impact of software over power consumption. For our purposes, we perform an experiment consisting in the execution of several code patterns on an embedded system. These code patterns are executed in two versions: the first one contains a code issue that could negatively impact power consumption, the other one is refactored removing the issue. We measure the power consumption of the embedded device during the execution of each code pattern. We also track the execution time to investigate whether Energy Code Smells are also Performance Smells. Our results show that some Energy Code Smells actually have an impact over power consumption in the magnitude order of micro Watts. Moreover, those Smells did not introduce a performance decreas
Introducing Energy Efficiency into SQALE
Full text linkEnergy Efficiency is becoming a key factor in software development, given the sharp growth of IT systems and their impact on worldwide energy consumption. We do believe that a quality process infrastructure should be able to consider the Energy Efficiency of a system since its early development: for this reason we propose to introduce Energy Efficiency into the existing quality models. We selected the SQALE model and we tailored it inserting Energy Efficiency as a sub-characteristic of efficiency. We also propose a set of six source code specific requirements for the Java language starting from guidelines currently suggested in the literature. We experienced two major challenges: the identification of measurable, automatically detectable requirements, and the lack of empirical validation on the guidelines currently present in the literature and in the industrial state of the practice as well. We describe an experiment plan to validate the six requirements and evaluate the impact of their violation on Energy Efficiency, which has been partially proved by preliminary results on C code. Having Energy Efficiency in a quality model and well verified code requirements to measure it, will enable a quality process that precisely assesses and monitors the impact of software on energy consumptio
Energy Efficiency in the ICT - Profiling Power Consumption in Desktop Computer Systems
Full text linkEnergy 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 resource
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
Smart Grid Technologies in Europe: An Overview
Full text linkThe old electricity network infrastructure has proven to be inadequate, with respect to modern challenges such as alternative energy sources, electricity demand and energy saving policies. Moreover, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) seem to have reached an adequate level of reliability and flexibility in order to support a new concept of electricity network—the smart grid. In this work, we will analyse the state-of-the-art of smart grids, in their technical, management, security, and optimization aspects. We will also provide a brief overview of the regulatory aspects involved in the development of a smart grid, mainly from the viewpoint of the European Unio
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