Climate Savers to software developers: Design for energy-efficiency
Desktop client hardware? Check. Networking gear? Check. Consumer electronics devices? Check.
Now up on the power management education agenda for Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) is application designers, developers and anyone else who might influence the design of software that subscribes to the notion that technology should be more energy efficient.
This agenda is being driven by George Goodman, executive director for the CSCI, who ran a roundtable about the topic at the recent IEEE Green Computing Conference in Orlando, Fla. When I spoke with Goodman after that meeting about the progress of the discussion, he said the participants were eager to share tips. In particular, developers have become more aware of the need to better integrate power management utilities into the enterprise software application framework, Goodman says. Power management needs to be able to do its job, without interfering with productivity, but some software currently doesn't account for that, he said.
Goodman's crusade will continue at the Intel Developer Forum in September in San Francisco, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it result in a position paper from the organization in the near future.
Meanwhile, if you KNOW that a piece of software is interfering with the ability of a power management utility to adjust the energy consumption of your desktop or notebook, CSCI wants to know about it. The organization wants to help bring the issue to the attention of the software's creators.