Small Changes, Big Impacts: Leveraging Diversity to Improve Energy Efficiency

TL;DR

This paper proposes leveraging software diversity by combining different third-party components to enhance energy efficiency in software systems, offering a practical approach accessible to non-specialists.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach that uses software diversity and component alternation to improve energy efficiency, complementing existing methods.

Findings

Diverse software components can reduce energy consumption.

Alternating between different implementations improves energy efficiency.

Non-specialists can effectively apply this approach.

Abstract

In the last few years, a growing body of research has proposed methods, techniques, and tools to support developers in the construction of software that consumes less energy. These solutions leverage diverse approaches such as version history mining, analytical models, identifying energy-efficient color schemes, and optimizing the packaging of HTTP requests. In this chapter, we present a complementary approach. We advocate that developers should leverage software diversity to make software systems more energy-efficient. Our main insight is that non-specialists can build software that consumes less energy by alternating at development time between readily available, diversely-designed pieces of software implemented by third-parties. These pieces of software can vary in nature, granularity, and quality attributes. Examples include data structures and constructs for thread management and synchronization.