IEEE Software Magazine Special Issue on Green Software
Publication date: Jan./Feb. 2014

Information technologies (IT) requiring vast amount of energy and other resources are used in almost every field and process. Green IT is the study and practice of using computing resources efficiently to reduce negative impacts on the environment. Green IT is applicable to various high-tech domains, such as data centers, mobile computing, and embedded systems. Recently, global carbon dioxide emissions reached 9.1 billion tons, the highest level in human history—49% higher than in 1990 (the Kyoto reference year). At least 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to IT systems; and further increases are expected with new IT systems being deployed daily. Therefore, reducing the energy consumption and related carbon dioxide emission of IT systems is a crucial requirement. Reducing energy consumption also leads to reduced maintenance expenses and costs of ownership, giving manufacturers a competitive advantage.

Change is therefore inevitable. Companies must implement energy-efficient and technology services around the globe. This, along with regulations and standards for measuring energy efficiency, will continue to drive the development of energy-efficient pathways. In this context, green IT is an ideal way for companies to achieve environmental sustainability and reduce the cost of system and product maintenance. Most studies and regulatory controls focus on hardware related measurement, analysis, and control for energy consumption. However, all forms of hardware include significant software components.

Although software systems do not consume energy directly, they affect hardware utilization, leading to indirect energy consumption. Therefore, it is important to engineer software with optimized energy consumption in mind.

As software continues to affect all aspects of our lives in ever-changing forms, leveraging existing systems is a challenging task for many companies. Keeping software available on demand with a high quality of service (in respect to end-users' requirements) creates a conflict in terms of software energy consumption. Moreover, each integrated quality feature is accompanied by increasing levels of energy consumption. Therefore, it is challenging to maintain environmentally friendly software.

On the other hand, software systems can play a proactive role in saving energy by providing feedback about the way they consume resources. Such proactive feedback can lead to changes in people's behavior and help make processes greener. Building green software systems has implications for environmental awareness, behavioral changes, and can contribute to the building of smart communities and cities.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Green software: definition, reality and vision.
Green software in different computing contexts (data centers, mobile devices, sensor networks, and embedded systems).
Software engineering of green software: requirements engineering, architecting and designing.
Trade-offs during analysis and prioritization of green IT-related requirements (for example, those related to energy consumption) versus others.
Quality assurance of green software (for example, quality models for greenness and metrics to measure them).
Making the world greener via software.
"Greening" legacy systems.
Energy as a hidden cost of computing.
Business models associated with green computing (for example, aggregation of workloads in cloud environments).
Cost/benefit analyses of green software efforts.
Tools enabling green software engineering.
Case studies and industry experience reports.
Incentives to invest in greener software.
Energy-aware programming languages.
Questions?
For further information about the topic, contact the guest editors:

Ayse Basar Bener, professor, Ryerson University: ayse.bener@ryerson.ca
Maurizio Morisio, professor, Politecnico di Torino: maurizio.morisio@polito.it
Andriy Miranskyy, software engineer, IBM Toronto Software Lab: andriy@ca.ibm.com
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