Zen and the Art of Data Center Greening (and Energy Efficiency)

The Green Software Unconference is scheduled for August 19 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. Since this is an unconference, there is no set agenda or program. But its theme is clear: What is green software and what can we do with it?

We can make software green so that it does not consume a lot of energy when executed. We tend to pay a lot of attention to hardware but little attention to software’s energy efficiency. As I wrote before,
there’s a good reason for that. You can touch, hear, and see hardware devices, but can you touch, hear, or see software? Hardware devices, whether or not in execution, are the same physical boxes. Software is drastically different when in execution and when not in execution. The source code is one representation of software when it is not in execution. In execution, it is an electrical signal in the hardware components, and you cannot see it in action (except as signals on an oscillator).

Software can be made more energy efficient.

These are some of the things we can consider:

Parallel programming—hard to program, nondeterministic (such as race condition)
Design/architecture—modularized structure vs. big monolithic chunk (e.g., SMTP server)
Interpretive vs. compiled—web languages vs. C, C++, and Java
Performance vs. ease of use—heavy on the ease of use and leave the heavy lifting to hardware
Optimization—optimizing compilers and other utilities

Refer to my previous blog for details. This is the first issue AltaTerra wants to present at the unconference. Hopefully, enough people are interested in this topic; otherwise, the subject will be dropped.

Another subject AltaTerra will propose at the unconference is monitoring and measuring power consumption. This relates to the carbon footprint and IT. The carbon footprint as it relates to IT will be discussed by our cofounder and president, Don Bray, who is an expert in carbon management.

I will cover what monitoring and measuring (and thus, metrics) have to do with green software. This is an example of how to make other things greener with software. I covered this subject in the previous blog in detail.

Power consumption is like software. You cannot touch, hear, or see it. Traditionally, IT managers do not see, much less review, the electricity bills for their data centers. Showing power consumption information continuously in real time and making it available to IT managers and executives would make IT folks aware of power consumption and encourage them to attempt to reduce it. Even a good idea, no matter how simple it is, needs a lot of time to sink in with practitioners. I confirmed it with Sentilla, which develops and markets monitoring and measuring solutions for data centers and other buildings. There are still a lot of data center operators who have not started monitoring and measuring their power consumption.

Tags: Green software Green software unconference Monitoring and measuring

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Green Software Unconference