Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A research software engineer profiles an n-body simulation and reduces wall-clock time by 40 percent, lowering carbon proportionally.
- Is an instance
A team chooses 16-bit precision for inference, halving GPU energy with no measurable loss of accuracy.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
Brute-force grid searches without any optimisation are not green software.
- Not an instance
Storing every intermediate artefact indefinitely contradicts the discipline.
Editorial commentary
Green software engineering applies eight principles including carbon awareness, energy efficiency, hardware efficiency, measurement, and climate commitments. In research it manifests as optimising hot inner loops, avoiding unnecessary precision, caching reusable artefacts, deleting unused training checkpoints, and selecting algorithms with lower computational complexity. The Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification published by the Green Software Foundation is the emerging measurement standard. Research software engineers (RSEs) are increasingly trained in these principles.
References
- Green Software Foundation principles; Software Carbon Intensity (SCI) specification.
Also known as
Green software · Sustainable software engineering · Carbon-efficient software
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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