Green IT - a GSoC topic?
I’m back from the conference at Berlin “Faktor X - Tag der natürlichen Ressourcen”, a side-conference of the World Resources Forum 2009 in Davos.
It was pretty interesting, although the topic is not new. If you don’t know it: We are running out of (several) resources. The main topics going through the media are often “energy” and “oil”. Well, several metals will become much more problematic much more earlier! So, what is the aim: material-, product- and production-efficiency and recycling/upcycling(/downcycling).
One of the topics mentioned at the conference was the IT industry. One of the keywords is “green IT” - more efficiency through IT, more efficiency by more efficient hardware, better recycling of hardware, …. Another point was “more efficiency by more efficient software”. One of the questions mentioned was “how much resources costs a click at google”. I think, one can adapt this question to almost every software. We have several software, which is widely used. I’ll just mention the apache web-server. Would’t it be good to know, that this widely used software won’t waste CPU cycles for nothing?
So what about a GSoC project checking such “often/widely used” software for efficiency (besides checking for buffer or heap overflows or NULL pointer dereferences)? Can anybody imagine such a project? What is your opinion?
Tags: efficiency, green, Software
September 18th, 2009 at 11:01 am
It’s not the only way to go. It’s just one of the various ways we IMO can and have to go. One thing to remember is, that we will unlikely solve any resource issue by going just one way.
Reducing the usage of metals and various other resources for and during the production of CPUs and other hardware and their recycling is unlikely a topic for a program author. But we can optimize code, with the advantage of having efficient and fast programs and reducing the usage of some resources (e.g. energy). Of course the industry must follow this way too on their field of engineering.