Green Computing as an Engineering Discipline

Green software; green computing

3/29/2017

By Rui Pereira, HASLab, INESC TEC & Minho University.

Abstract. While in the previous century computer users were mainly looking for fast computer software, this is nowadays changing with the advent of powerful mobile devices, like laptops, tablets and smartphones. In our mobile-device age, one of the main computing bottlenecks is energy consumption. This growing concern on energy efficiency may also be associated with the perspective of software developers. Unfortunately, developing energy-aware software is still a difficult task. While programming languages provide several compiler optimizations, memory profiler tools, benchmark and time execution monitoring frameworks, there are no equivalent tools/frameworks to profile/optimize energy consumption.

This talk is focused on introducing the motivation behind green software and briefly showing some challenges faced in researching this topic. The talk will also touch on several misconceptions in this research area, while also showcasing several of the speaker’s concluded and ongoing research.

Keywords. Green software; green computing; fault-localization; source-code analysis and manipulation.

About the speaker. Rui Pereira is a fourth-year MAPi PhD student, affiliated with HASLab/INESC TEC & the University of Minho, and working under the supervision of Prof. João Saraiva and Prof. Jácome Cunha. He received his MSc degree in Informatics Engineering in 2013, with the thesis “Queryin for Model-Driven Spreadsheets” under the SpreadSheets as a Programming Paradigm (SSaaPP) project. Currently, his areas of research are green computing, source-code analysis and manipulation, and human-computer interaction. For his PhD thesis “Analyzing and Optimizing Abnormal Energy Consumption in Software Systems”, in which he was also awarded an FCT grant for, he focuses on the challenge of both detecting where high energy consumption occurs and understanding how to avoid and optimize this abnormal behaviour. He is also one of the founding members of the Green Software for Space Control Mission (GreenSSCM) project, the Software Repositories for Green Computing FLAD/NSF project, and the Green Software Lab: Green Computing as an Engineering Discipline (GSL) project.