The Green Software Foundation’s mission is to build a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling and best practices for creating and building green software. Needless to say: Ab Ovo feels strongly connected to this mission! Our commitment to environmentally conscious technologies reaches beyond our products and clients, and that is why Ab Ovo participated in Carbon Hack 2024 of the Green Software Foundation.
Until now, no single solution has managed to calculate software’s impacts across all components, across all environments. Impact Framework (IF), an open-source project by the Green Software Foundation, attempts to do just that, be it for carbon emissions, water or land usage, or other chemical impacts. This “IF” is a framework to Model, Measure, siMulate and Monitor the environmental impact of software.
The Green Software Foundation organizes Hackathons aiming to contribute to their mission. In 2024, the so-called Carbon Hack was about how to measure the environmental impact of software. For 3 weeks (18 March until 08 April) Ab Ovo competed to showcase our application of IF in measuring the ecological footprint of our Eco Logic Platform. Contributing to the ‘Best Content‘ category, we applied the Impact Framework to energy-utilization logged in our Eco Logic Platform.
Ab Ovo’s Eco Logic Platform logs all function-calls (which are sub-processes in the software) together with the parameters needed to calculate energy utilization (such as CPU cycles and memory utilization). This information allowed the team to apply the IF on a very granular – per function-call – level. In doing so, we were able to measure the energy utilization per function call.
While measurements per function-call are already quite groundbreaking, we managed to combine them with time-dependent information about electricity grids (the so-called emission factors per hour) of 44 emission regions. The resulting dataset contained 4.59 million function calls, mapped to 44 different server regions.
To be able to draw meaningful conclusions from such an extensive dataset with limited effort, a PowerBI dashboard was created. Find the information in this link
The award ceremony for the Hackathon is planned for the 18th of April. Regardless of whether Ab Ovo wins or not, we are proud to have applied the Impact Framework to the Eco Logic Platform. The results show the vast array of possibilities when making IT more eco-friendly with the Eco Logic Platform, first by measuring, giving analyses and insights and even what-if scenarios to be applied.
For further information, please contact:
Barbara Roos – Barbara.Roos@ab-ovo.com
