Edited by Christopher Douce, Friday, 3 Jan 2020, 18:34
It takes far too long for my desktop PC to finish booting up every morning. From the moment I throw the power switch of my aging XP machine to the on position and click on my user name, I have enough time to walk to the kitchen, brew a cup of tea, do some washing and tidying up and drink half my cup of tea (or coffee), before I can begin to load all the other applications that I need to open before settling down to do some work.
I would say it takes over fifteen minutes from the point of power up to being able to do some 'real stuff'. All this hanging around inevitably sucks up quite a bit of needless energy. Even though I do have some additional software services installed, such as a database and a peer-to-peer TV application, I don't think my PC is too underpowered (it's a single core running just over a gigahertz with half a gig of memory).
Being of a particular age, I have fond memories of the time when you turned on a computer, the operating system (albeit a much simpler one) was almost instantly available. Ignoring the need to load software from cassettes or big floppy disks, you could start to issue commands and do useful stuff within seconds of powering up.
This is one of the reasons why I like my EEE netbook (wikipedia): if I have an idea for something to write or want to talk to someone or find something out, then I can turn it on and within a minute or two it is ready for use. (As an aside, I remember reading in Insanely Great by Steven Levy (Amazon) the issue of boot up time was an important consideration when designing the original Macintosh).
Green Code
These musings make me wonder about the notion of 'green code': computer software that is designed in such a way that it supports necessary functionality by demanding a minimal amount of processor or memory resources. Needless to say, this is by no means an original idea. It seems that other people are thinking along similar lines.
In a post entitled, Your bad code is killing my planet, Alistair Croll writes, 'Once upon a time, lousy coding didn't matter. Coder Joel and I could write the same app, and while mine might have consumed 50 percent of the machine's CPU whereas his could have consumed a mere 10 percent, this wasn't a big deal. We both paid for our computer, rackspace, bandwidth, and power.'
Croll mentions that software is often designed in terms of multiple levels of abstraction. He states that there can be a lot of 'distance and computing overhead between my code and the electricity of each processor cycle'. He goes on to write, 'Architecture choices, and even programming language, matter'. Software architecture choices do matter and abstractions are important.
Green Maintenance
Making code that is efficient is only part of the story. Abstractions allow us to hide complexity. They help developers to compartmentalise and manage the 'raw thought stuff' which is computer code. Well designed abstractions can give software developers who are charged with working and maintaining existing systems a real productivity boost.
Code that is easier to read and work with is likely to be easier to maintain. Maintenance is important since some researchers' report that maintenance accounts for up to 70% of costs of a software project.
In my opinion, clean code equals green code. Green code is code that should be easy to understand, maintain and adapt.
Green Challenges
Croll, however, does have a point. Software engineers should need to be aware of the effect that certain architectural choices may have on final system performance.
In times when IT budgets may begin to be challenged (even though IT may be perceived as technology that can help to create business and information process efficiencies), the request for an ever more powerful server may be frowned upon by those who hold the budgetary purse strings. You may be asked to do more with less.
This challenge exposes a fundamental computing dilemma: code that is as efficient as it could be may be difficult to understand and work with. Developers have to consider such challenges carefully and walk a careful path of compromise. Just as there is an eternal trade off between speed of a system and how much power is consumed, there is also a difficult trade offs to consider in terms of efficiency and clarity, along with the dimensions of system flexibility and functionality.
One of the reasons why Microsoft Vista is not considered to be popular is the issue of how resource hungry it is in terms of memory, processor speed and disk drive space. Microsoft, it seems is certainly aware of this issue (InfoWorld).
Turning off some of the needless eye candy, such as neatly shaded three dimensional buttons, can help you to get more life out of your PC. This is something that Ted Samson mentions, before edging towards discussing the related point of power management.
Ted also mentions one of those well known laws of computing. He writes, 'just because there are machines out there that can support enormous system requirements doesn't mean you have to make your software swell to that footprint'. In other words, 'your processor and disk space needs expands to the size of your machine' (another way of also saying 'your project expands to the amount of time you have available'!)
Power Budgets
Whilst I appreciate my EEE PC in terms of its quick boot up time, it does have an uncomfortable side effect: it also acts as a very effective lap warmer. Even more surprisingly, its batteries are entirely depleted within slightly over two hours of usage. This is terrible! A mobile device should not be tethered to a mains power supply. It also makes me wonder about whether its incessant demand for power is going to cut short the life of its batteries (which represent their own environmental challenge).
When working alongside electrical engineers, I would occasionally over hear them discussing power budgets, i.e. how much power would be consumed by components of a larger electrical system. In terms of software, both laptop and desktop PC offer a range of mysterious software interfaces that provide 'power management' functionality. This is something that I have not substantially explored or studied. For me, this is an area of modern PCs that remain a perpetual mystery. It is certainly something that I need do to something about.
Sometimes, the collaboration between software developers and hardware engineers can yield astonishing results. I again point towards the One Laptop per Child project. I remember reading some on-line discussions that described changes that were made to the Linux operating system kernel to make the OLPC device more power efficient. A quick search quickly throws up an Environmental Impact page.
The OLPC device, whether you agree with the objective of the OLPC project or not, has had a significant impact on the design of laptop systems. A second version of the device raises the possibility of netbooks using the energy efficient ARM processor (wikipedia) - the same processor that is used (as far as I understand) in the iPhone and iPod I, for one, look forward to using a netbook that doesn't unbearably heat up my lap and allows me to do useful work without having to needless wasted time searching for power sockets.
My desktop computer (which was assembled by my own fair hands) produces a side effect that is undeniably useful during the winter months: it perceptibly heats up my room almost allowing me to totally dispense with other forms of heating completely (but I must add that a chunky jumper is often necessary). When I told someone else about this phenomenon, I was asked, 'big computer or small room?' The answer was, inevitably, 'small room' (and small computer).
Google
On a related note, I was recently sent a link to a YouTube video entitled Google container data centre tour. It was astonishing (and very interesting!) It was astonishing due to the sheer scale of the installation that was presented, and interesting in terms of the industrial processes and engineering that were described. It reminded me of a news item that was featured in the media earlier this year that related to the carbon cost of carrying out a Google search.
The sad thing about the Google data centre (and, of course, most power plants) is that most of the heat that is generated is wasted. I recently came across this article, entitled Telehouse to heat homes at Docklands. Apparently there are other schemes to use data centres for different kinds of heating.
Before leaving Google alone, you might have heard of a site called Blackle. Blackle takes the Google homepage and inverts it. The argument is that if everyone uses a black search page, large power savings can be made.
Mark Ontkush describes the story of Black Google and others in a very interesting blog post which also mentions other useful ideas, such as the use of Firefox extensions. Cuil is another search engine (pronounced 'cool') that embodies the same idea.
Carbon Cost of Spam
I recently noticed a news item entitled Spam e-mails killing the environment (ITWorld). Despite the headline having a passing resemblance to headlines that you would find on the Daily Mail, I felt the article was worth a look. It references a more sensibly titled report, The carbon footprint of email spam, published by McAfee.
The report is interesting, pointing towards the fact that that we may spend a lot of time both reading and processing junk emails that end up in our inbox. The article has an obvious agenda: to sell spam filters. An effective spam filter, it is argued, can reduce the amount of time that email users spend processing spam, thus helping to save the planet (a bit). Spam can fill up email servers, causing network administrators to use bigger disks. To be effective, email servers need to spend time (and energy) filtering through all the messages that are received. I do sense that more research is required.
Invisible Infrastuctures
There is a further connection between the challenge of spam and the invisible infrastucture of the internet. Messages to your PC, laptop or mobile device pass through a range of mysterious switches, routers and servers. At each stage, energy is mysteriously consumed and paid for by an invisible set of financial transactions.
My own PC, I should add, is not as power friendly as it could be. It contains two hard disk drives: a main drive that contains the operating system, and a secondary drive that contains backup files and also 'swap' area. The main reason for the second drive is to gain a performance boost.
Lower power PCs
After asking the question, 'how might I create an energy efficient PC', I discovered an interesting article from Ars Technica entitled It's easy being green. It describes each of the components of a PC and considered how much power they can draw. The final page features a potential PC setup in the form of 'an extreme green box'.
It is, however, possible to go further. The Coding Horror blog presents one approach: use kit that was intended for embedded systems - a domain where power consumption is high on the design agenda. An article, entitled Building Tiny, Ultra Low Power PCs is a fun read.
Both articles are certainly worth a view. One other cost that should be considered, however, is the cost of manufacturing (and also recycling) your existing machine. I don't expect to change my PC until the second service pack for Windows 7 is released. It's going to be warming my room for quite some time, but perhaps the carbon consumption stats that relate to PC manufacture and disposal are out there somewhere that may help me to make a decision.
Concluding thoughts
Servers undeniably cost a lot of money not only in terms of their initial purchase price, but also in terms of how much energy they consume over their lifetime.
Efficient software has the potential to reduce server count, allowing more to be achieved with less. Developers should aspire to write code that is as efficient as possible, and take careful account of the underlying software infrastructures (and abstractions) that they use. At the heart of every software development lies a range of challenging compromises. It often takes a combination of experience and insight to figure out the best solution, but it is important to take account of change since the majority of the time on any software system is likely to be during the maintenance phase of a software project.
The key to computing energy reduction doesn't only rest with computer scientists, hardware designers and software engineers. There are wider social and organisational issues at play, as Samson hints at in an article entitled No good excuses not to power down PCs. The Open University has a two page OU Green computing guide that makes a number of similar points.
One useful idea is to quantify computer power in terms of megahertz per miliwatt (MPMs) instead of millions of instructions per second (MIPS) - I should add that this isn't my idea and I can't remember where it came from! It might be useful to try to establish a new aspirational computing 'law'. Instead of constantly citing Moore's law which states that the number of transistors should double every two years, perhaps we need to edge towards trying to propose a law that proposes a reduction in power consumption whilst maintaining 'transactional performance'. In this era of multi-core multi-function processors, this is likely to be a tough call, but I think it's worth a try.
One other challenge is whether it might be possible to crystalise what is meant by 'green code', and whether we can explore what it means by constructing good or bad examples. The good examples will run on low powered slower hardware, wherease the bad examples will likely to be sluggish and unresponsive. Polling (constantly checking to see whether something has changed) is obviously bad. Ugly, inelegant, poorly structured and hard to read (and hard to change) code could also be placed in a box named 'bad'.
A final challenge lies with whether it might be possible to explore what might be contained within a sub-discipline of 'green computing'. It would be interesting to see where this might take us.
Acknowlegements: Photograph of a fern, entitled 'Mandelbrot En Vert', has been liberated from Flickr. It is licensed under creative commons by GaijinSeb.
Green Code
It takes far too long for my desktop PC to finish booting up every morning. From the moment I throw the power switch of my aging XP machine to the on position and click on my user name, I have enough time to walk to the kitchen, brew a cup of tea, do some washing and tidying up and drink half my cup of tea (or coffee), before I can begin to load all the other applications that I need to open before settling down to do some work.
I would say it takes over fifteen minutes from the point of power up to being able to do some 'real stuff'. All this hanging around inevitably sucks up quite a bit of needless energy. Even though I do have some additional software services installed, such as a database and a peer-to-peer TV application, I don't think my PC is too underpowered (it's a single core running just over a gigahertz with half a gig of memory).
Being of a particular age, I have fond memories of the time when you turned on a computer, the operating system (albeit a much simpler one) was almost instantly available. Ignoring the need to load software from cassettes or big floppy disks, you could start to issue commands and do useful stuff within seconds of powering up.
This is one of the reasons why I like my EEE netbook (wikipedia): if I have an idea for something to write or want to talk to someone or find something out, then I can turn it on and within a minute or two it is ready for use. (As an aside, I remember reading in Insanely Great by Steven Levy (Amazon) the issue of boot up time was an important consideration when designing the original Macintosh).
Green Code
These musings make me wonder about the notion of 'green code': computer software that is designed in such a way that it supports necessary functionality by demanding a minimal amount of processor or memory resources. Needless to say, this is by no means an original idea. It seems that other people are thinking along similar lines.
In a post entitled, Your bad code is killing my planet, Alistair Croll writes, 'Once upon a time, lousy coding didn't matter. Coder Joel and I could write the same app, and while mine might have consumed 50 percent of the machine's CPU whereas his could have consumed a mere 10 percent, this wasn't a big deal. We both paid for our computer, rackspace, bandwidth, and power.'
Croll mentions that software is often designed in terms of multiple levels of abstraction. He states that there can be a lot of 'distance and computing overhead between my code and the electricity of each processor cycle'. He goes on to write, 'Architecture choices, and even programming language, matter'. Software architecture choices do matter and abstractions are important.
Green Maintenance
Making code that is efficient is only part of the story. Abstractions allow us to hide complexity. They help developers to compartmentalise and manage the 'raw thought stuff' which is computer code. Well designed abstractions can give software developers who are charged with working and maintaining existing systems a real productivity boost.
Code that is easier to read and work with is likely to be easier to maintain. Maintenance is important since some researchers' report that maintenance accounts for up to 70% of costs of a software project.
In my opinion, clean code equals green code. Green code is code that should be easy to understand, maintain and adapt.
Green Challenges
Croll, however, does have a point. Software engineers should need to be aware of the effect that certain architectural choices may have on final system performance.
In times when IT budgets may begin to be challenged (even though IT may be perceived as technology that can help to create business and information process efficiencies), the request for an ever more powerful server may be frowned upon by those who hold the budgetary purse strings. You may be asked to do more with less.
This challenge exposes a fundamental computing dilemma: code that is as efficient as it could be may be difficult to understand and work with. Developers have to consider such challenges carefully and walk a careful path of compromise. Just as there is an eternal trade off between speed of a system and how much power is consumed, there is also a difficult trade offs to consider in terms of efficiency and clarity, along with the dimensions of system flexibility and functionality.
One of the reasons why Microsoft Vista is not considered to be popular is the issue of how resource hungry it is in terms of memory, processor speed and disk drive space. Microsoft, it seems is certainly aware of this issue (InfoWorld).
Turning off some of the needless eye candy, such as neatly shaded three dimensional buttons, can help you to get more life out of your PC. This is something that Ted Samson mentions, before edging towards discussing the related point of power management.
Ted also mentions one of those well known laws of computing. He writes, 'just because there are machines out there that can support enormous system requirements doesn't mean you have to make your software swell to that footprint'. In other words, 'your processor and disk space needs expands to the size of your machine' (another way of also saying 'your project expands to the amount of time you have available'!)
Power Budgets
Whilst I appreciate my EEE PC in terms of its quick boot up time, it does have an uncomfortable side effect: it also acts as a very effective lap warmer. Even more surprisingly, its batteries are entirely depleted within slightly over two hours of usage. This is terrible! A mobile device should not be tethered to a mains power supply. It also makes me wonder about whether its incessant demand for power is going to cut short the life of its batteries (which represent their own environmental challenge).
When working alongside electrical engineers, I would occasionally over hear them discussing power budgets, i.e. how much power would be consumed by components of a larger electrical system. In terms of software, both laptop and desktop PC offer a range of mysterious software interfaces that provide 'power management' functionality. This is something that I have not substantially explored or studied. For me, this is an area of modern PCs that remain a perpetual mystery. It is certainly something that I need do to something about.
Sometimes, the collaboration between software developers and hardware engineers can yield astonishing results. I again point towards the One Laptop per Child project. I remember reading some on-line discussions that described changes that were made to the Linux operating system kernel to make the OLPC device more power efficient. A quick search quickly throws up an Environmental Impact page.
The OLPC device, whether you agree with the objective of the OLPC project or not, has had a significant impact on the design of laptop systems. A second version of the device raises the possibility of netbooks using the energy efficient ARM processor (wikipedia) - the same processor that is used (as far as I understand) in the iPhone and iPod I, for one, look forward to using a netbook that doesn't unbearably heat up my lap and allows me to do useful work without having to needless wasted time searching for power sockets.
My desktop computer (which was assembled by my own fair hands) produces a side effect that is undeniably useful during the winter months: it perceptibly heats up my room almost allowing me to totally dispense with other forms of heating completely (but I must add that a chunky jumper is often necessary). When I told someone else about this phenomenon, I was asked, 'big computer or small room?' The answer was, inevitably, 'small room' (and small computer).
Google
On a related note, I was recently sent a link to a YouTube video entitled Google container data centre tour. It was astonishing (and very interesting!) It was astonishing due to the sheer scale of the installation that was presented, and interesting in terms of the industrial processes and engineering that were described. It reminded me of a news item that was featured in the media earlier this year that related to the carbon cost of carrying out a Google search.
The sad thing about the Google data centre (and, of course, most power plants) is that most of the heat that is generated is wasted. I recently came across this article, entitled Telehouse to heat homes at Docklands. Apparently there are other schemes to use data centres for different kinds of heating.
Before leaving Google alone, you might have heard of a site called Blackle. Blackle takes the Google homepage and inverts it. The argument is that if everyone uses a black search page, large power savings can be made.
Mark Ontkush describes the story of Black Google and others in a very interesting blog post which also mentions other useful ideas, such as the use of Firefox extensions. Cuil is another search engine (pronounced 'cool') that embodies the same idea.
Carbon Cost of Spam
I recently noticed a news item entitled Spam e-mails killing the environment (ITWorld). Despite the headline having a passing resemblance to headlines that you would find on the Daily Mail, I felt the article was worth a look. It references a more sensibly titled report, The carbon footprint of email spam, published by McAfee.
The report is interesting, pointing towards the fact that that we may spend a lot of time both reading and processing junk emails that end up in our inbox. The article has an obvious agenda: to sell spam filters. An effective spam filter, it is argued, can reduce the amount of time that email users spend processing spam, thus helping to save the planet (a bit). Spam can fill up email servers, causing network administrators to use bigger disks. To be effective, email servers need to spend time (and energy) filtering through all the messages that are received. I do sense that more research is required.
Invisible Infrastuctures
There is a further connection between the challenge of spam and the invisible infrastucture of the internet. Messages to your PC, laptop or mobile device pass through a range of mysterious switches, routers and servers. At each stage, energy is mysteriously consumed and paid for by an invisible set of financial transactions.
My own PC, I should add, is not as power friendly as it could be. It contains two hard disk drives: a main drive that contains the operating system, and a secondary drive that contains backup files and also 'swap' area. The main reason for the second drive is to gain a performance boost.
Lower power PCs
After asking the question, 'how might I create an energy efficient PC', I discovered an interesting article from Ars Technica entitled It's easy being green. It describes each of the components of a PC and considered how much power they can draw. The final page features a potential PC setup in the form of 'an extreme green box'.
It is, however, possible to go further. The Coding Horror blog presents one approach: use kit that was intended for embedded systems - a domain where power consumption is high on the design agenda. An article, entitled Building Tiny, Ultra Low Power PCs is a fun read.
Both articles are certainly worth a view. One other cost that should be considered, however, is the cost of manufacturing (and also recycling) your existing machine. I don't expect to change my PC until the second service pack for Windows 7 is released. It's going to be warming my room for quite some time, but perhaps the carbon consumption stats that relate to PC manufacture and disposal are out there somewhere that may help me to make a decision.
Concluding thoughts
Servers undeniably cost a lot of money not only in terms of their initial purchase price, but also in terms of how much energy they consume over their lifetime.
Efficient software has the potential to reduce server count, allowing more to be achieved with less. Developers should aspire to write code that is as efficient as possible, and take careful account of the underlying software infrastructures (and abstractions) that they use. At the heart of every software development lies a range of challenging compromises. It often takes a combination of experience and insight to figure out the best solution, but it is important to take account of change since the majority of the time on any software system is likely to be during the maintenance phase of a software project.
The key to computing energy reduction doesn't only rest with computer scientists, hardware designers and software engineers. There are wider social and organisational issues at play, as Samson hints at in an article entitled No good excuses not to power down PCs. The Open University has a two page OU Green computing guide that makes a number of similar points.
One useful idea is to quantify computer power in terms of megahertz per miliwatt (MPMs) instead of millions of instructions per second (MIPS) - I should add that this isn't my idea and I can't remember where it came from! It might be useful to try to establish a new aspirational computing 'law'. Instead of constantly citing Moore's law which states that the number of transistors should double every two years, perhaps we need to edge towards trying to propose a law that proposes a reduction in power consumption whilst maintaining 'transactional performance'. In this era of multi-core multi-function processors, this is likely to be a tough call, but I think it's worth a try.
One other challenge is whether it might be possible to crystalise what is meant by 'green code', and whether we can explore what it means by constructing good or bad examples. The good examples will run on low powered slower hardware, wherease the bad examples will likely to be sluggish and unresponsive. Polling (constantly checking to see whether something has changed) is obviously bad. Ugly, inelegant, poorly structured and hard to read (and hard to change) code could also be placed in a box named 'bad'.
A final challenge lies with whether it might be possible to explore what might be contained within a sub-discipline of 'green computing'. It would be interesting to see where this might take us.
Acknowlegements: Photograph of a fern, entitled 'Mandelbrot En Vert', has been liberated from Flickr. It is licensed under creative commons by GaijinSeb.