April 20, 2011
During the well-received workshop Green Software, organized by SIG and Green IT Amsterdam Region, in ICT~Office’s ICT Week, several speakers shared their vision and experiences on green software with the workshop participants.

Savings due to the design and use of green software come in many forms and potentially have a large impact. We have learned that energy savings can be as large as 80%, and that other forms of savings include the opportunity to retain valued employees.

Anwar Osseyran, chairman of the board of Green IT Amsterdam Region, emphasized in his presentation that there’s a dawning realization that software is key to energy efficiency, and that it is valuable to the Dutch economy to create ‘a green ocean of opportunities’.

Joost Visser, head Research of SIG, presented the results of their ICT research on green software. The Sustainability Scan he presented, maps the functional and computational efficiency of existing software. This scan gives insights into where savings can be brought about. The first show that in four scenario’s up to 80% energy savings can be realized by designing green software.

Mechtild Kuijpers, director Sustainability of Centric, emphasized that performing scans on sustainability of software systems is very important when raising awareness of the engineers of the systems and of the external stakeholders such as governments and certification agencies. According to Centric, the central challenge of the pilots proofed to be the collect the right measurement data, and the most important outcome of this AgentschapNL supported Sustainability scan was the initiation of discussions at Centric’s development and operations departments on energy efficiency.

Ramon van Alteren, team lead system engineering of Hyves.nl, introduced Hyves as a green organization. Hyves aggressively aims at optimizing in-house Green IT, because it saves costs and it gives them a competitive advantage. Hyves is a Dutch online community with 9.5 million members, and millions of active visitors each day. The computer capacity that supports this website is huge. Ramon’s team operates over 3000 servers, and is constantly looking for improvements on operational efficiency. Here, green and efficiency go hand in hand. One method for Hyves to green its IT is to replace hardware as soon as faster and more efficient models appear, refurbishing its old hardware. Another method is to actively design its software infrastructure to optimally utilize the hardware, for example by automatically translating php to efficient C++ code, or by designing alternative means to utilize multi core processing options. These and other measures resulted in over 60% savings in Hyves’ energy usage.

Jan Willem Tellegen, managing director of Green IT Amsterdam, closed the workshop with an open invitation to the participants of the workshop to create a Green Software Community. This is envisioned to be an innovative platform for representatives of universities, research organizations, ICT suppliers, and ICT users, to work on more extensive green scans and metrics. The goal: to support the economy with Green software.

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