Creating greener software

Green computing is a very broad term encompassing endeavours such as the development and use of energy efficient hardware, the powering of computing infrastructure with renewable energy sources, the repurposing and recycling of computing assets, to extracting benefit from the excess heat produced by HPC systems for example.

On the software side there are decisions a software engineer can make to create software that is more environmentally friendly. These decisions relate to various aspects of the software engineering process such as design and coding choices, choice of programming language, as well as monitoring and testing. 

Highlighted here are some practical and general considerations to employ during the development cycle that can help lead to more energy efficient software. For illustrative purposes a comparison of the energy efficiency of some coding test cases is also presented.