The EU funded Excess project, led by Chalmers University of Technology, set out to address what it saw as a lack of holistic, integrated approaches to cover all system layers from hardware to user level software. The project initially analysed where energy was wasted and has used that data to develop a framework that, it believes, should enable rapid development of energy efficient software.
“There was a clear lack of tools and mathematical models to help the software engineers to program in an energy efficient way and to reason abstractly about the power and energy behaviour of their software,” said project leader Professor Philippas Tsigas from Chalmers. “The holistic approach of the project involves both hardware and software components, enabling the programmer to make power aware architectural decisions early. This allows for larger energy savings than previous approaches, where software power optimisation was often applied as a secondary step.”
The Excess project believes it has taken ‘major steps’ towards providing software developers and system designers with tools and models which allow them to program energy efficiently. The tool box is said to span from energy saving hardware components, such as the Movidius Myriad platform, to efficient libraries and algorithms.