Energy-Efficiency Comparison of Common Sorting Algorithms

With the rising demand for information technology comes an increase in energy consumption to power it. Namely, cloud computing is constantly growing, in part due to a rising number of devices using the cloud to provide certain functionality. This growth leads to an increase in energy consumption in data centers and is estimated to climb to over 1PWh in 2030. Hardware manufacturers counter the rising demand for energy in cloud data centers by providing techniques to make servers more energy-efficient. However, the advances cannot fully compensate for the growth. To further increase energy efficiency, software needs to be addressed as well but is often neglected by the developers.In this paper, we compare six sorting algorithms, a common task in most programs, against each other in terms of energy efficiency to allow developers to select the best solution to their problem. We selected well-known algorithms in two variants, and two implementation languages, C and Python. We ran each algorithm on two, out of four, state-of-the-art server systems with different CPUs.