Programming for Low Power Usage
I just came across this very interesting session in the OSCON schedule, entitled Programming for Low Power Usage.
It's great to see this kind of stuff bubbling up. With the focus on global warming, energy is seen as the next investment gold rush, but often, it's the little things away from the main action that can have a huge impact. One of my all-time favorite environmental pieces was a 1975 article by Steve Baer called The Clothesline Paradox, which pointed out that when someone decides to hang their clothes on the line rather than put them in the dryer, it doesn't get measured as a gain for solar energy vs. other sources. Similarly, conservation, and technology for conservation, often gets short shrift.
For our Energy Innovation Conference, we're not just looking for the latest hot startups and speculative science. We're also looking for those obvious but overlooked areas where computer scientists and hackers can bring fresh thinking to the energy problem.
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Back in December I posed the question "at what point will designers consider the electric cost per click" in interface design. Specifically, I started off thinking about how much focus Google puts into response latency, and was wondering how (and when) they would consider the cost per click which because of their horizontally scaling approach is clearly in tension with the latency dimension.
My guess is that topics like the one you point out at this conference will gain mind share as computer science begins to feel more like automotive design; where energy consumption is an important design consideration for every component. For example, in the 1950's most Detroit engineers would have never heard of Reynold's Numbers, laminar flow, or coefficient of drag and I doubt if any of their designs ever spent time in a wind tunnel. Starting in the 1970's and 80's focus on aerodynamic efficiency (as just one example) became a regular part of design.
I know this is deep in the stack now but you might find this related post on power saving in linux to be interesting:
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