A Green Computing Based Architecture Comparison and Analysis

With rising energy cost and growing environmental concerns, green computing is receiving more and more attention. Software and system architectures ( in terms of concurrency patterns) play a crucial role in both computing and telecommunication systems, and they have been analyzed for performance, reliability, maintainability, and security. Yet, little work on analysis based on the amount of energy that the CPU/processor will consume has been reported. Since most communication systems have to run 24/7 (e.g., most server farms, servers in a cloud computing infrastructure), the energy consumption of a system based on a specific software architecture is of great importance. For example, high energy consuming always leads to higher operational cost of the system. High energy consumption also implies more heat produced, thus, more power is required for cooling-down. In this paper, we propose a model that can be used to analyze the energy consumption of a software architecture, given the CPU/processor that will be used. Thus, this model gives one an additional dimension to compare competing software architectures. We present a case study using a generic sender/receiver communication system to evaluate two architectural alternatives with emphasis on energy consumption.