Green Software Engineering: The Curse of Methodology

Computer Science often seems distant from its natural science cousins, especially software engineering which feels closer to sociology and psychology than to physics. Physical measurements are often rare in software engineering, except in a few niches. One such important niche is that of software energy consumption, green mining, green IT, and sustainable computing, which all fall under the umbrella of green software engineering. With the physical measurement of energy consumption comes all of the limitations of measurement and experimentation that exist in the natural sciences and engineering. Issues abound, from attribution of energy use, isolation of components, to replicable experiments. These get further complicated by cloud computing whereby systems are virtualized and attribution of resource usage is a serious issue. Thus in this work we discuss the current state of software energy consumption, and where will it go.