A Resource Utilization Score for Software Energy Consumption

Abstract

Software as the true consumer of power and its potential contribution to reach sustainability goals is increasingly being acknowledged. Studies so far have presented successful results and methods to address the energy consumption of the software, indicating that different stakeholders striving for green software have different information needs with respect to their goals. However, currently there is no uniform manner to communicate measurements to the different stakeholders such that key findings are clearly identifiable and easy to understand, which is likely to hamper green software practices. In this paper we propose a metric that expresses a score for the resource utilization, such as power consumption, of a software product. The metric is designed to be a single score and is flexible to encompass those aspects that a stakeholder considers relevant in the context of software energy consumption. The metric was applied on two applications and allowed for objective comparison of application configurations and versions. Also the behavior of these applications across different hardware configurations could be analyzed. In addition to the metric we investigate means to visualize measurements which enhances communication and helped with highlighting the key findings.