A preliminary study of the impact of software engineering on GreenIT

GreenIT has emerged as a discipline concerned with the optimization of software solutions with regards to their energy consumption. In this domain, most of state-of-the-art solutions offer limited or constraining approaches to monitor the energy consumption of a device or a process. In this paper, we therefore report on a runtime energy monitoring framework we developed to easily report on the energy consumption of system processes. Concretely, our approach adopts an OS-level library, called PowerAPI, which estimates the power consumption of processes according to different dimensions (CPU, network, etc.). In order to better understand potential energy leaks of legacy software, we use this library to study the impact of programming languages and algorithmic choices on the energy consumption. This preliminary study is based on an empirical evaluation of a eight implementations of the Towers of Hanoi problem.