Efforts to make digital infrastructure more efficient are making great progress - but the struggle to make code less wasteful has barely started. In our latest Zero Downtime podcast, we talk to entrepreneur and academic David Mytton about why this is.
Data centers are now all keen to reduce their PUE - a simple and effective measure of how much power is wasted on its way to the servers in the data center racks. But after that, are the servers using energy responsibly, or wasting it to execute unnecessary loops and fruitless calculations?
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Mytton talks us through efforts by Green Software Foundation to develop a measure of Software Carbon Intensity that will tell developers if their software is a good planetary citizen.
But the complexity continues. What if software is running on multiple hardware platforms? What about the embodied energy of the hardware you choose for it? The way forward must be to make software which is aware of where it is running, what energy is being used, and what carbon that consumes.
Mytton is co-founder & CEO of developer tools company Console, and is working on a PhD in sustainable computing at the University of Oxford. Who better to make sense of this area?