Presenter: Stefanos Georgiou
Date: 01 February 2021

Energy efficiency for computer systems is an ever-growing matter that has caught the attention of the software engineering community. Although hardware design and utilization are undoubtedly key factors affecting energy consumption, there is solid evidence that software design can also significantly alter the energy consumption of IT products. Therefore, the goal of this dissertation is to show the impact of software design decisions on the energy consumption of a computer system.

Initially, we analyzed 92 research papers from top-tier conferences and categorized them under the Software Development Life Cycle taxonomy. From this study, we were able to find many research challenges. Among these challenges, we identified that there is limited work in the context of different programming languages’ energy and delay implications.

To this end, we performed an empirical study and pointed out which programming languages can introduce better energy and run-time performance for specific programming tasks and computer platforms (i.e., server, laptop, and embedded system). Motivated further by our survey results, we performed an additional study on different programming languages and computer platforms to demonstrate the energy and delay implications of various inter-process communication technologies (i.e, REST, RPC, gRPC).

From the above studies, we were able to introduce guidelines on reducing the energy consumption of different applications by suggesting which programming languages to utilise in specific cases. Finally, we performed experiments to examine the energy and run-time performance taxing that security measures have over 128 distinct benchmark suites. By investigating the impact of CPU-related vulnerabilities (Meltdown, Spectre, and MDS), communication-related security measures (HTTP/HTTPS), memory protection (memory zeroing), and compiler safeguards (GCC), we have found that these measures can impact the energy and run-time performance of real-work applications (Nginx, Apache, Redis) by up to 20%.