Green Software Engineering: The Curse of Methodology

Computer Science often seems distant from itsnatural science cousins, especially software engineering whichfeels closer to sociology and psychology than to physics. Physicalmeasurements are often rare in software engineering, except in afew niches. One such important niche is that of software energyconsumption, green mining, green IT, and sustainable computing, which all fall under the umbrella of green software engineering. With the physical measurement of energy consumption comesall of the limitations of measurement and experimentation thatexist in the natural sciences and engineering. Issues abound, fromattribution of energy use, isolation of components, to replicableexperiments. These get further complicated by cloud computingwhereby systems are virtualized and attribution of resource usageis a serious issue. Thus in this work we discuss the current state of softwareenergy consumption, and where will it go.