under construction - please follow my Twitter feed for updates
Green Software Engineering
Green Software Engineering will help you reduce the environmental footprint of your IT services, helping the planet and (generally) helping save you money. Green Software Engineering covers a very wide remit. It is proposed to set up a team of Green Software Engineers (GSEs) who have training and experience in a variety of approaches to reduce the environment footprint, including:
- purchasing & supply chain
- ability to measure/monitor the energy consumption of codes and systems
- design, architecture and re-factoring to minimise energy to solution when simulations and analyses are run
- consideration of cloud v. on-premises and of which is the more appropriate technology platform (which CPU? when GPU and/or FPGA are appropriate) as well as when & how to optimially port to such platforms
- sharing best practices via a shared repository of knowledge
- running knowledge sharing events
- continually improving their knowledge and skills
A key aspect of experienced GSEs is to know which approach will be most appropriate (save most Carbon) in the client's unique case. My teaching at Manchester Met (MMU) includes training students as Green Software Engineers. Please get in contact if you wish to know more.
Michael coined the phrase "Green Software Engineers" at the ENERGTIC workshop (see Section 3.3.3 of Martin Juckes, Michael Bane, Jennifer Bulpett, Katie Cartmell et al. Sustainability in Digital Research Infrastructure: UKRI Net Zero DRI Scoping Project final technical report. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8199984 (2023)), part of Computing Insight UK 2022.
Use of Green Software Engineering to support Net Zero Compute
My research interests includes include quantifying potential Carbon savings of various suggested inventions, such that these can be ranked. As well as the actual savings were an intervention to be introduced, we also need to consider how to overcame barriers to uptake (such as negative perceptions of a given intervention). By ranking each intervention according to both these metrics we can determine the most appropriate to ready for implementation (e.g. that with most Carbon savings that would be readily taken-up) and focus research & other energies into these areas (rather than an intervention with marginal Carbon sabvings that would be met with hostile resistance). Given the challenge of keeping global climate temperatures no more than 1.5C above pre-industrial average grows harder the slower it is faced, I am keen also to research how to accelerate the uptake of the most appropriate interventions.
Green Software Engineering is not just writing software
The diagram on the right (click to enlarge) is an initial attempt to show some key areas of Green Software Engineering. A "smart green scheduler" would automate many of the Carbon-reducing options on behalf of the user (perhaps within some bounds (e.g. data cannot be transfered outside a given national network) and it is important we think widely about how we want to go about computing. I would say it's paramount to have a paradigm shift ASAP from "compute as soon and as fast as possible" to "compute only what is needed and with as little Carbon as possible".
UK Repository for Green Software Engineering
UK Repository for Green Software Engineering
This is a work in progress. It currently subset of academic papers that I refer to. It will shortly also include info on others working in this area and examples of good practise
Things you can do to Green Your Compute
Take action today!
My Contact Details
email // LinkedIn // Twitter