Flexible Desktop Application Management and Its Influence on Green Computing

Environmentally sustainable computing and green computing have been studied addressing the need of reducing power consumption mainly in area of high performance computing systems(HPC), mostly on the server side. However, desktop applications in wide-spread use of large organizations and companies are given relatively less focus. In this paper, we study the application fast deployment and fast crash restore through lightweight application virtualization, which can actually conserve energy by significantly reducing application installation/start up time and application crash restore time. We demonstrate that the proposed lightweight application virtualization method has little performance degradation with a noticeable energy saving by carrying out experiments on lots of commonly used real-world work applications. In addition, we implement the prototype system to help users to continue normal work quickly without losing data after crashing. Several novel mechanisms are utilized to make the process fast. We evaluate the system from aspects of start up time, runtime performance and application compatibility, and using a power evaluation model to measure the effectiveness of the system.