Repositories for energy-saving software Going Green

A number of open source projects offer tools for analyzing energy usage in software.

- Kristian Kißling

Word is starting to get out: Software often unnecessarily wastes a huge amount of energy. Several open source projects are developing tools for studying and measuring exactly how much. This article tours some of the most promising tools.

Taking a Tour 

The Green Software Foundation (GSF) [1], which the Linux Foundation launched in 2022, has the stated mission to “Build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling, and best practices for creating and building green software.” For this purpose, the GSF, which includes companies such as Microsoft, Intel, and Accenture, is organized into working groups. There are already several repositories with software, tools, and documents available on https:// github. com/ Green‑Software‑Foundation.

For example, the Open Source Working Group (opensourcewg) maintains a repository called Awesome Green Software [2] with links to a whole host of tools and research articles on energy conservation, as well as links to useful free software. On top of this, you will find an overview of climate organizations, as well as access to free articles, papers, and books.

The GSF also highlights software for the cloud and machine learning. For example, there is a link to the Green Cost Explorer [3], a JavaScript tool that docks onto Amazon’s AWS Cost Explorer, but it also takes into account the energy types of the AWS regions as well as the costs. It ultimately shows you how much renewable (Green) and fossil (Grey) energy your cloud application requires.