Desktop and server software at the present moment in time is very rarely developed with its energy consumption as a major consideration. However in a world with limited resources this becomes a growing concern, especially as developers cannot cater to this need since the appropriate tools are currently lacking.
The Green Metrics Tool is an open source framework that allows for measuring, comparing and optimizing the energy consumption of arbitrary software. The goal is to empower both software engineers and users to make educated decisions about libraries, code-snippets and software in order to save energy and thus carbon emissions.
Any application will be containerized and then analyzed by its logical parts. The open source tool measures classical performance metrics as well as energy related metrics like wattage, temperature and cooling efficiency to understand what part of the software is responsible for which part of the energy consumption.
Through the concept of usage scenarios we create an interface for developers to test/develop against. In the end this makes complex software products comparable to each other and thus enables developers to select libraries based on their functionality-energy-profile (for instance messages per Watt or similar).
We present the roadmap for this tool over the next year, which will result in a public and open database of energy information for arbitrary hardware setups, code blocks and libraries and a green standard library / green code completion.
