WSJ writes on Green Software

March 12, 2008 Dave Ohara

WSJ writes on Green Software saving energy, listing Carbonetworks, Optimum Energy, and Verdiem.

focused on low-technology steps such as turning down thermostats and switching off lights when they're not needed. Now more high-tech "green software" programs have popped up to help companies cut their energy consumption.

Software start-ups such as Carbonetworks Corp., Optimum Energy LLC and Verdiem Corp. are making new programs to help businesses monitor their energy use and figure out when to use power at times when power rates are cheapest, among other things. Several large Fortune 500 companies are also spurring the trend of green software by designing their own applications to reduce energy use.

Microsoft is joining the mix as well

This may help explain why so many businesses are turning to green software companies. At an industry conference in San Francisco last month, one of the most anticipated panels was a session called "The Next Cleantech Frontier -- Software." One speaker, Robert Bernard, is chief environmental strategist for Microsoft Corp., which is rolling out software to help measure and track greenhouse gas emissions in 40 cities around the world as part of a collaboration with President Clinton's Climate Initiative, an effort launched by the former president in 2006 to help address climate-change issues.

The smart thing is customers are running pilot programs like UPS cited below to test the energy savings in their own environments.

Green software sales, meanwhile, are taking off. Verdiem says the number of electronic devices in businesses using its Surveyor program for remotely-adjusting energy use of computers and other equipment shot up to 600,000 last year from about 85,000 in 2006. The Seattle company says its 200 customers, which include giants such as Clear Channel Communications Inc. of San Antonio and a pilot program with UPS, have saved a combined half a billion kilowatt hours of electricity, or 500,000 tons of carbon emissions, since it began offering the service about two years ago.

Visual Studio 2008's saves energy with Application Performance Profiling

January 10, 2008 Dave Ohara

I've been searching for the right tool that enables energy efficient application development. Finally, the Microsoft Visual Studio team has the feature in their 2008 release coming out soon. Send this post on to your dev teams and architects to develop energy efficient applications.

The first feature that I want to cover is the new comparison document that we’ve introduced to help users compare profiling data from two different profiling runs. Say that you have just checked in a possible fix for a performance issue and you want to compare a new performance report to one that existed before the change to see if your change really helped. Our new comparison features make these types of questions easy to answer. Comparing two files of performance data is a very common scenario for customers, especially when dealing with regression testing, so this was a priority feature for us in this release. After all, performance data when taken in isolation, without goals to hit or old values to compare with, can be pretty hard to work with. Our goal with this new comparison work is to help customers to make better use of their performance data to achieve the performance results that they desire for their applications.

I would be remiss if I did not take a quick second here to dive a little deeper into the importance of setting performance goals for your applications. Too often developers end up in the situation of closing in on product release and realizing “my app is just way too slow.” Now, it is perfectly understandable that developers want to save performance optimization for the end of the product cycle; after all if the underlying structure is going to change greatly why waste too much time early on trying to tweak things to run as fast as possible? But the real issue with the situation above is in the generalness of the “my app is just way too slow” part. What exactly do you mean by “too slow?” What parts of the app are too slow? What type of performance do customers expect from your app? How long does it take for other similar products to do the same task? For our new comparison features to be really useful you will need to take some time before and during development to get at least basic answers to some of the questions above.

And, they've also integrated collecting perfmon data for

With the Visual Studio Profiler we wanted to give customers an easy and integrated way to collect this performance counter information and view it alongside their performance data. This was especially important to us as with this information we could help customers to analyze specific trouble areas of their program or to choose the correct profiling modes based on their performance bottleneck.

Where is the Green Software?

December 29, 2007 Dave Ohara

The Blog Ship Software onTime! presents rules for being a green software engineer.

Then I got to thinking, as software engineers, what’s our responsibility for being green? I did a couple of searches and ended up with nothing. The general view appears to be that software developers are automatically green. After all, how could software not be green? It’s just a bunch of bits, right? Software hardly has an environmental impact, or so is the consensus. Can software be any more green than it already is?

As I thought more about the subject, I realized that in fact there is a huge variance in software greenliness (new word?). The notion of green has always existed in software development under a different name: “Simple!” Yes, simple, is the word we have used to describe the most green software in our industry and some of the most successful software products of all time have been the greenest solutions. I’ll get to some examples in a minute.

I started writing a long response, but I knew I was missing the point. So, after a few days I was able to simplify the issue.

Assumptions are made in what is considered efficient software, the problem almost all these assumptions run open loop. There are no closed loops to measure how accurate the design assumptions were once the software has been deployed. Bringing real time feedback to the developers on how well their code runs and how green it is in production is what will change behavior.

Some companies have started to expose the power consumption of applications in the data center to developers. You can do all the testing you want in development, but until deployment you don't know what really is happening. Most developers have no idea on the costs to provision more power let alone how much power costs.

The call to action for the devolper is to add application instrumentation which allows operations to determine the amount of power used by an application components and/or transactions. Few architects are thinking at this level, but I am finding a few who are.