How to make your software more sustainable?

Are you amazed by the pace of AI development? You certainly should be: the number of UK AI companies has increased by over?600% over the last decade; the current AI market is worth more than ￡16.8 billion which is expected to grow to ￡801.6 billion by 2035. And by 2025, as many as 97 million people will work in the AI space globally. It is thrilling to see the convenience brought by rapid technology development, but at the same time, we need to be aware of the huge ecological challenges connected to today's technology industry.

Understanding the Environmental Impact

As datasets and models become more complex, the energy demand for training and running AI models rises dramatically. This surge in energy consumption directly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Research from OpenAI indicates that since 2012, the computing power necessary for training cutting-edge AI models has doubled approximately every 3.4 months. Projections suggest that by 2040, emissions from the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry could account for as much as 14% of global emissions.

Think about it: every line of code, every server request, and every data transfer comes at a cost to the environment. The energy-intensive nature of data centres, coupled with the massive amounts of electricity required to power our digital infrastructure, contributes to carbon emissions on a scale that's hard to ignore.

So if you're in the Tech industry, or if your company's day-to-day operations revolve around software development and code writing, what can you do to make your software more environmentally friendly?

?The Concept of Green Coding

One of the ideas here is to embrace the concept of green coding. Two decades ago, developers were constrained by bandwidth restrictions and limited processing capabilities, which made them be mindful about the code length and complexity. However, advancements in technology have removed many of these barriers. Increased computing power facilitates faster processing of large files and applications. Additionally, the availability of open-source libraries and frameworks enables software engineers to incorporate pre-existing code components into their projects. Yet, this may result in programmes with larger codebases, demanding more processing power to interpret. Consequently, this unintended outcome has led to greater energy consumption and a corresponding rise in global electricity demand. But still open-source code fosters collaboration and innovation, leading to more efficient programming practices. The key thing is how we are going to optimise techniques and implement sustainable coding practices to ensure the environmental impact is minimised while benefiting from open-source development.

So at its core, green coding is about optimising software efficiency to minimise its ecological footprint. It's about programmes that not only get the job done but do so in the most energy-efficient way possible.

Practical Strategies for Green Coding

To put green coding into practice, we provide you with some useful strategies:

1. Code optimisation: The first step to optimise your code is to reduce data usage by adopting an efficient cache policy. Remember to compress and aggregate data and use smaller sizes for media and image files when possible. You can also use tools to monitor real-time power consumption through dynamic code analysis. The data will help you understand the gaps between the design choices and the actual energy consumption profile.
2. Better choice of coding language and AI model: Even the choice of the language you use in your project will make a difference. As one of the most popular programming languages, Python has a particularly?bad energy efficiency rating in general. But we are not suggesting switching to C, which is considered the greenest language, for every coding task. It’s important to assess your specific task and consider factors such as security, platform compatibility and overall development time. Also, you can choose languages with a wide range of eco-friendly tools and resources, which could facilitate the development of environmentally conscious software. There isn't a one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to determining the best language under different criteria It's the same for choosing the right AI model. AI can be more environmentally friendly by developing and using a less-power-consuming machine learning model. Also, you can take advantage of the reproducible code from open sources that will reduce duplicated efforts.
3. Greener platform: Green coding extends beyond software alone. The hardware used in the process of creating your software is an important element to consider. It’s better to use one server at full capacity than five servers at 20% capacity, considering cost of embodied carbon. Embodied carbon is the amount of carbon emitted during the creating and disposal of a device. Cloud computing provides another solution by allowing resources to be scaled dynamically to suit particular needs. Ideally, the cloud computing server also operates on renewable energy sources.

Green Coding in Action

Embarking on the journey of green coding can be challenging, especially when you need to assess your overall environmental impact throughout the software development lifecycle. Explore Salesforce's case study to gain insights into how to effectively implement green coding practices in action:

?? Last year, Salesforce launched a ‘Green Code’ initiative to help reduce emissions associated with the software development lifecycle. It spans across different roles from UX designers and software developers to system architects and IT operations managers. Designers are recommended to streamline the user experience and build a faster experience with fewer steps in data flow. For software architects, they are integrating reusable APIs to prevent excessive resource usage. Additionally, efforts are made in operations to strategically allocate capacity and schedule workloads during periods of high renewable energy availability.

In summary, as technology advances, so do the ecological challenges it poses. Green coding offers a solution, emphasising energy-efficient software development lifecycle. Through the implementation of eco-designed alternatives in refining systems, we have the potential to significantly reduce unnecessary energy waste, potentially by as much as 30%. After all, when it comes to saving the world, every line of code matters.

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