Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Building Greener Sustainable Software

Technology use has grown rapidly in recent years. It is infused in virtually every aspect of organizational and individual life. This technology runs on servers, typically in data centers. As workloads grow, more serves are required. Each server incrementally adds to the energy consumption footprint of a data center. Currently, data centers account for more than one percent of all power usage worldwide. Clearly, energy efficiency is a significant concern for data centers. While many aspects of data center energy efficiency have received attention, energy consumption is rarely considered in software development organizations. In this work, we consider the energy consumption impacts of fundamental software operations, and demonstrate that non-trivial energy savings can be achieved in software by making energy-conscious decisions regarding basic aspects of programming. This work has significant potential for practical impact; applying the lessons learned in this study can lead to greener sustainable software.