Locating Energy Hotspots in Source Code

Pereira, Rui

doi:10.1109/icse-c.2017.151

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…This paper defines a technique, named SPELL -SPectrum-based Energy Leak Localization, that has been implemented in a tool, to determine red (energy inefficient) areas in software. The idea of this approach has been previously proposed in [18,19,20]. In this paper, we consider an energy leak synonymous to an energy inefficiency.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SPELLing out energy leaks: Aiding developers locate energy inefficient code

Pereira

Carção

Couto

et al. 2020

Journal of Systems and Software

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Although hardware is generally seen as the main culprit for a computer's energy usage, software too has a tremendous impact on the energy spent. Unfortunately, there is still not enough support for software developers so they can make their code more energy-aware.This paper proposes a technique to detect energy inefficient fragments in the source code of a software system. Test cases are executed to obtain energy consumption measurements, and a statistical method, based on spectrumbased fault localization, is introduced to relate energy consumption to the source code. The result of our technique is an energy ranking of source code fragments pointing developers to possible energy leaks in their code. This technique was implemented in the SPELL toolkit.Finally, in order to evaluate our technique, we conducted an empirical study where we asked participants to optimize the energy efficiency of a software system using our tool, while also having two other groups using no tool assistance and a profiler, respectively. We showed statistical evidence that developers using our technique were able to improve the energy efficiency by 43% on average, and even out performing a profiler for energy optimization.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SPELLing out energy leaks: Aiding developers locate energy inefficient code

Pereira

Carção

Couto

et al. 2020

Journal of Systems and Software

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“…The research which relate the closest to our study are the ones of Pereira et al [31,32]. In their studies, a tool under development named SPELL is presented.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Additionally, our approach does not rely on the coefficient of test case similarity, but instead evenly distributes the energy consumption among the items covered by the test cases. While the goal of the SPELL tool [31,32] lies in providing the means to precisely locate energy hotspots in source code, our study aims to investigate if more naive approaches can be used to effectively locate them. This enables us to lie the groundwork to accurately understand through empirical experimentation the magnitude of the tradeoff that lies between performance and precision of spectrum based energy hotspot localization.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Code-Level Energy Hotspot Localization via Naive Spectrum Based Testing

et al. 2018

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With the growing adoption of ICT solutions, developing energy efficient software becomes increasingly important. Current methods aimed at analyzing energy demanding portions of code, referred to as energy hotspots, often require adhoc analyses that constitute an additional process in the development life cycle. This leads to the scarce adoption of such methods in practice, leaving an open gap between source code energy optimization research and its concrete application. Thus, our underlying goal is to provide developers with a technique that enables them to efficiently gather source code energy consumption information without requiring excessive time overhead and resources. In this research we present a naive spectrumbased fault localization technique aimed to efficiently locate energy hotspots. More specifically, our research aims to understand the viability of spectrum based energy hotspot localization and the tradeoffs which can be made between performance and precision for such techniques. Our naive yet effective approach takes as input an application and its test suite, and utilizes a simple algorithm to localize portions of code which are potentially energy-greedy. This is achieved by combining test case coverage information with runtime energy consumption measurements. The viability of the approach is assessed through an empirical experiment. We conclude that the naive spectrum based energy hotspot localization approach can effectively support developers by efficiently providing insights of the energy consumption of software at source code level. Since we use processes already in place in most companies and adopt straightforward data analysis processes, naive spectrum based energy hotspot localization can reduce the effort and time required for assessing energy consumption of software and thus make including the energy consumption in the development process viable. As future work we plan to (i) further investigate the tradeoffs between performance and precision of spectrum based energy hotspot approaches (ii) compare our approach to similar ones through large-scale experiments. Our ultimate goal is to conceive ad-hoc tradeoff tuning of performance and precision according to development and organizational needs.

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“…Moreover, we extended this technique to detect energy hotspots in the source code of a software system [46]. This technique was named Spectrum-based Energy Leak Localization and was awarded the silver medal in ACM Student Research Competition (ACM SRC) at International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017) -Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2017: Rui Pereira -a PhD students and a member of GSL -won this prestigious award [44]. This technique to detect energy leaks in software systems was also presented at ICSE as a poster paper [42] and implemented as a software prototype -named SPELL -that is now available to the research community, fully defined within a prestigious journal paper [46].…”

Section: Task T1: Methods For Energy Leak Localizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Green Software Lab: Towards an Engineering Discipline for Green Software

Abreu¹,

Couto²,

Cruz³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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This report describes the research goals and results of the Green Software Lab (GSL) research project. This was a project funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) -the Portuguese research foundation -under reference POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016718, that ran from January 2016 till July 2020. This report includes the complete document reporting the results achieved during the project execution, which was submitted to FCT for evaluation on July 2020. It describes the goals of the project, and the different research tasks presenting the deliverables of each of them. It also presents the management and result dissemination work performed during the project's execution. The document includes also a self assessment of the achieved results, and a complete list of scientific publications describing the contributions of the project. Finally, this document includes the FCT evaluation report.

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Locating Energy Hotspots in Source Code

Cited by 7 publications

References 39 publications

SPELLing out energy leaks: Aiding developers locate energy inefficient code

SPELLing out energy leaks: Aiding developers locate energy inefficient code

Code-Level Energy Hotspot Localization via Naive Spectrum Based Testing

Green Software Lab: Towards an Engineering Discipline for Green Software

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