How effective code increases sustainability in business
This article is part of a special issue of VB. Read the full series here: Smart Sustainability.
Everything counts in large quantities. You don't have to be Google or create big AI models to benefit from efficient code. But how do we measure this?
It's complicated, but that's what Abhishek Gupta and the Green Software Foundation (GSF) are working tirelessly on. The GSF is a non-profit organization formed by the Linux Foundation, with 32 organizations and nearly 700 individuals participating in various projects to further its mission.
His mission is to create a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tools and best practices to create and develop green software, which he defines as "software responsible for emitting less greenhouse gases. greenhouse".
Accenture, BCG, GitHub, Intel, and Microsoft participate in the GSF, and its efforts are organized into four working groups: standards, policy, open source, and community.
Gupta, who chairs the Standards Working Group at the GSF, in addition to his roles as BCG's Senior Manager and AI Expert and Founder and Principal Investigator of the AI Ethics Institute from Montreal, shared current work and roadmap on measuring the impact of software on sustainability.
The first step towards a greener code is to measure its impactThe first thing Gupta notes about the GSF is that it focuses on reduction, not neutralization. This means that things like renewable energy credits or power purchase agreements, aimed at offsetting and neutralizing, are not part of the GSF's mission. The focus, Gupta said, is on real reductions in how you design, develop and deploy software systems. This is a work in progress and a very complex exercise.
But businesses of all sizes can benefit from more efficient code. Think about what happens to your phone or laptop when you run applications that involve more or less processing, i.e. playing videos rather than editing text. The difference in battery discharge is significant. The larger the scale, the higher the stakes. Making large language models more efficient, for example, could lead to huge cost savings.
The first step to improvement is to measure, as the famous saying goes. The focus of Gupta's work with the GSF Standards Working Group is the so-called Carbon Intensity Software Specification (SCI). The SCI specification defines a methodology for calculating the carbon emissions rate for a software system.
The GSF has adopted the concept of carbon efficiency to reflect on the carbon impact of software systems. This, Gupta explained, breaks down into three parts: energy efficiency, material efficiency, and carbon awareness.
Energy efficiency is about consuming as little electricity as possible. Electricity is the primary way that software consumes energy, and in most parts of the world, it's primarily generated from burning fossil fuels. This is where its carbon impact comes from.
Material efficiency tries to use as little embodied carbon as possible. Embodied carbon, Gupta noted, is intended to capture the carbon impact of anything that goes into hardware such as servers, chips, smartphones, etc.
Carbon awareness is about trying to do more work when the electricity is “clean” and less when the electricity is “dirty,” Gupta said. It also evokes the notion of energy proportionality. The idea is that higher utilization rates for a piece of hardware means that electricity is turned into more useful work, rather than idling. However, when it comes to measuring impact, things get complicated.
“Some people look at flops. Some look directly at the energy consumed by systems, and there are a variety of approaches that lead to quite different results. This is one of the challenges we face on the field,” Gupta said.
The goal, Gupta said, is to ensure that energy efficiency, material efficiency and carbon awareness are addressed very explicitly in the calculation. Eventually, the SCI aims to become an official standard, promoting comparability.
Granularity and transparency are essential for a complex enterprise...
This article is part of a special issue of VB. Read the full series here: Smart Sustainability.
Everything counts in large quantities. You don't have to be Google or create big AI models to benefit from efficient code. But how do we measure this?
It's complicated, but that's what Abhishek Gupta and the Green Software Foundation (GSF) are working tirelessly on. The GSF is a non-profit organization formed by the Linux Foundation, with 32 organizations and nearly 700 individuals participating in various projects to further its mission.
His mission is to create a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tools and best practices to create and develop green software, which he defines as "software responsible for emitting less greenhouse gases. greenhouse".
Accenture, BCG, GitHub, Intel, and Microsoft participate in the GSF, and its efforts are organized into four working groups: standards, policy, open source, and community.
Gupta, who chairs the Standards Working Group at the GSF, in addition to his roles as BCG's Senior Manager and AI Expert and Founder and Principal Investigator of the AI Ethics Institute from Montreal, shared current work and roadmap on measuring the impact of software on sustainability.
The first step towards a greener code is to measure its impactThe first thing Gupta notes about the GSF is that it focuses on reduction, not neutralization. This means that things like renewable energy credits or power purchase agreements, aimed at offsetting and neutralizing, are not part of the GSF's mission. The focus, Gupta said, is on real reductions in how you design, develop and deploy software systems. This is a work in progress and a very complex exercise.
But businesses of all sizes can benefit from more efficient code. Think about what happens to your phone or laptop when you run applications that involve more or less processing, i.e. playing videos rather than editing text. The difference in battery discharge is significant. The larger the scale, the higher the stakes. Making large language models more efficient, for example, could lead to huge cost savings.
The first step to improvement is to measure, as the famous saying goes. The focus of Gupta's work with the GSF Standards Working Group is the so-called Carbon Intensity Software Specification (SCI). The SCI specification defines a methodology for calculating the carbon emissions rate for a software system.
The GSF has adopted the concept of carbon efficiency to reflect on the carbon impact of software systems. This, Gupta explained, breaks down into three parts: energy efficiency, material efficiency, and carbon awareness.
Energy efficiency is about consuming as little electricity as possible. Electricity is the primary way that software consumes energy, and in most parts of the world, it's primarily generated from burning fossil fuels. This is where its carbon impact comes from.
Material efficiency tries to use as little embodied carbon as possible. Embodied carbon, Gupta noted, is intended to capture the carbon impact of anything that goes into hardware such as servers, chips, smartphones, etc.
Carbon awareness is about trying to do more work when the electricity is “clean” and less when the electricity is “dirty,” Gupta said. It also evokes the notion of energy proportionality. The idea is that higher utilization rates for a piece of hardware means that electricity is turned into more useful work, rather than idling. However, when it comes to measuring impact, things get complicated.
“Some people look at flops. Some look directly at the energy consumed by systems, and there are a variety of approaches that lead to quite different results. This is one of the challenges we face on the field,” Gupta said.
The goal, Gupta said, is to ensure that energy efficiency, material efficiency and carbon awareness are addressed very explicitly in the calculation. Eventually, the SCI aims to become an official standard, promoting comparability.
Granularity and transparency are essential for a complex enterprise...What's Your Reaction?
