Green Software Lab

Rui Pereira receives silver medal in ACM Student Research Competition at ICSE 2017

Rui Pereira, a doctoral student of HASLab, reached the second place in the ACM Student Research Competition at ICSE 2017, with the article “Locating energy hotspots in source code”.
The article entitled “Locating energy hotspots in source code”, which was initially submitted in the form of a long abstract paper, was presented in a second evaluation phase in poster form at the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering, one of the most important conferences in the field of Software Engineering, and it was carried out under the project GSL – Green Software Laboratory, a national project financed by FCT.

In this evaluation phase, along with nine other candidates, Rui Pereira made a small public presentation and exhibition of the poster during a special session of the same conference, before a jury composed of five ICSE and ACM members. Only four researchers advanced to the final phase of the competition.

In the third and final phase, with a research talk at ICSE, Rui Pereira achieved the second place in the competition, losing the first place to a researcher from Carnegie Mellon University, and prior Apple researcher. In this phase, three were awarded a medal.

The next round will be in the Grand Final of the ACM Research Competition, where all medalists participate in the ACM Student Research Competition. This round will be during the ACM Awards Banquet an event where, as a general rule, the Turing Award is presented, that is, a prize awarded by ACM to a person who contributed significantly to the area of Computing.

It is important to mention that this competition, sponsored by Microsoft, offers a unique forum for undergraduate and graduate students to present their original research before a panel of judges and attendees at well-known ACM-sponsored and co-sponsored conferences.

This edition of ICSE was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina, from May 20 to 28 and has an annual membership of approximately 1600 participants.

New paper accepted @ SPLC’17

 

Products go Green: Worst-Case Energy Consumption in Software Product Lines -Marco Couto, Rui Pereira, Paulo Borba, Jácome Cunha, João Paulo Fernandes and João Saraiva

The optimization of software to be (more) energy efficient is becoming a major concern for the software industry. Although several techniques have been presented to measure energy consumption for software, none has addressed software product lines (SPLs). Thus, to measure energy consumption of a SPL, the products must be generated and measured individually, which is too costly.

In this paper, we present a technique and a prototype tool to statically estimate the worst case energy consumption for SPL. The goal is to provide software developers with techniques and tools to reason about the energy consumption of all products in a line, without having to produce, run and measure the energy in every combination.

Our technique combines classic static program analysis techniques and worst case execution time prediction with energy consumption analysis. This technique analyses all products in a feature-sensitive manner, that is, a feature used in several products is analyzed only once, while the energy consumption is estimated once per product.

We implemented our technique in a tool called Serapis. We did a preliminary evaluation using a realistic product line for image processing implemented in C. Our experiments considered 7 products from such line and our initial results show that the tool was able to estimate the worst-case energy consumption with a mean error percentage of 9.4% and standard deviation of 6.2% when compared with the energy measured when running the products.

Marco Couto talk @ InfoBlender, Universidade do Minho, May 10th

Please find below the detailed program.
Date & Location: Wednesday, May 10th, 2017, at DI, Gualtar campus, Braga.
Coffee Session: 13h30 -14h, Sala de Estar, 4th Floor.
Talk Session: 14h -14h30, Auditório A2, firstfloor.
Speakers. Marco Couto, HASLabINESC TEC & Minho University.
Title. Static Energy Consumption Analysis in Software: The Worst-Case Scenario
Abstract. Energy consumption is becoming an evident concern to software developers. While programming languages provide several compiler optimizations, memory profiler tools, benchmark and time execution monitoring frameworks, there are no equivalent tools/frameworks to profile/optimize energy consumption.This is even more notorious due to the propagation of mobile devices. Such propagation of devices is also influencing software development: a software system is now developed as a set of similar products sharing common features. This talk will focus on explaining how energy consumption analysis can be performed in software in a very challenging and promising manner: statically, without execution. Moreover, a case study will be used to better explain how to achieve this, while showing the speaker’s ongoing work in the area.