Green IT and Green Software Rising energy demands and the growing negative environmental impact from the increased adoption of IT services are motivating the green movement in IT, which places great importance on the design and implementation of green solutions. Green IT is applicable to a range of high-tech domains, including datacenters, mobile computing, and embedded systems. Annual global carbon dioxide emissions recently reached 9.1 billion tons, the highest level in human history — 49 percent higher than in 1990 (the Kyoto reference year).[1] At least 2 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to IT systems, and further increases are expected as new IT systems are deployed daily. Reducing IT systems’ energy consumption and related carbon dioxide emissions is a vital undertaking. The Problem Most studies and regulatory controls focus on hardware-related measurement, analysis, and control for energy consumption. However, all forms of hardware systems are controlled by software components. Although software systems don’t consume energy directly, they affect hardware utilization, leading to indirect energy consumption. Therefore, it’s important to engineer software so that its energy consumption is optimized. The software engineering research domain has recently been paying attention to sustainability, as the increased number of publications, empirical studies, and conferences on the topic demonstrate. Green IT aims for minimal environmental impact from the design, production, and use of computers, servers, monitors, printers, storage devices, and networking and communications systems. It focuses on product and process efficiency, in terms of environmental sustainability, as well as applying IT to create energy-efficient, environmentally sustainable business processes and practices. IT can support, assist, and leverage other environmental initiatives and help in creating green awareness. Like green IT generally, greening in software seeks to reduce the environmental impact of the software itself. Greenness is thus an emerging software quality attribute to consider, as well. Software companies are beginning to confront the conflict between being as environmentally friendly as possible and customer pressure for new functional requirements and high quality. Yet, software systems can also play a proactive role in saving energy by providing feedback about the way they consume resources and, ideally, leading people to change behaviors and create greener processes. #Green #IT #Software
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 09:30:00 +0000
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