With the growing need of the industry and due to high business demands, there have consequently been high demands of IT products to address these needs (majorly seen in the automation of business/industrial processes). Although the primary objective of efficiency in business processes has been achieved by IT to a large extent, this has resulted to large negative impacts on the environment/increased energy consumption in the IT sector.

Current research addresses energy-efficiency (EE) from the perspective of datacentres and computing hardware. This has resulted in the proposition of a variety of energy-efficient methods for cooling, power savings, hybrid resource provisioning, and task consolidation, however at the hardware level. Very little work has been carried out at the software stack; such as proposition of green algorithms, frameworks and models.

An in-depth study (still on-going) into the composition of software products has led to the need for fine-grained green or EE implementation in IT. With the fundamental principle; that all systems (including software products) are built on architectures an interesting research area would be to investigate how software architectures can contribute to energy efficient computing for distributed platforms – hence the term ‘greener software architecture’ and the major concern of this research.

updated: Jan. 2013.
www.greensoftresearch.com