Workshop: Green Software Engineering

The student’s representative council in cooperation with the Umwelt-Campus Birkenfeld is organizing a workshop on Green Software Engineering on January 15 from 9:30-11:30, of course digitally. Since the number of participants is limited, please register until January 10 at the following link:

https://forms.gle/wuDsYCfCuKeRSJTu5

There are no fees. 

There will be an introductory lecture of about half an hour, during which Prof. Naumann from the Umwelt-Campus will explain the question of the ecological footprint of information technology. This is by no means trivial, as digitization and the necessary components such as end devices, networks, data centers/cloud-computing and also software are on the one hand seen as contributors to environmental pollution and climate change, and on the other hand are also traded as part of the solution to these complex problems. Information and communications technology (ICT) causes over 2 % of greenhouse gas emissions across the board and is thus of the same order of magnitude as international air traffic or even the CO2 emissions of Germany. Conversely, digitization offers considerable opportunities when it comes to savings and optimization: There are indications that consumption can be overcompensated by ICT, provided that optimization and efficiency potentials are exploited e.g. in the areas of agriculture, mobility, building automation and production.

As programmers, we have a great deal of influence on this impact when we design software. This will be the focus of the practical part of the workshop, in which we will be guided through the measurement environment for recording the energy and resource consumption of IT and software, and the setup and implementation of various tests will be explained. Test results will be interpreted and participants can come up with their own ideas for future projects.

The workshop will present the ecological ICT footprint in a coherent manner, as well as criteria for more sustainable ICT based on the “Blauer Engel (Blue Angel) for Software” and “Blauer Engel for Data Centers” certifications. (The “Blauer Engel” is a German seal for particularly environmentally friendly products).

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us: contact@cs.fs.uni-saarland.de