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By Heiko Weckbrodt
Dresden. Artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrencies, streaming video services, the growing need for cloud data centers and other digitalization trends have an ecological downside that users of these brave new digital worlds rarely notice: Along with them, the energy consumption of computers installed worldwide is rising sharply. In Europe, there has been an increase of over 55 percent within a decade: While European data centers consumed just under 56 terawatt hours (TWh) of energy in 2010, ten years later the figure was already almost 87 TWh. This corresponds to around 2.7 percent of European electricity demand, according to a Fraunhofer study for the Federal Ministry of Economics.
However, this is just the beginning - and only an excerpt. There are far more data centers in North America and Asia than in Europe, but above all, a trend reversal is no longer foreseeable. Because in order to mine Bitcoins electronically, for example, private computer farms in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, China and other countries are working day and night, 365 days a year, often powered by electricity from huge coal-fired power plants. And something that is often overlooked: If we ask ChatGPT for information from the Internet, the electricity consumption is According to estimates by Dutch data economist Alex de Vries about 30 times higher than a simple Google query. And in view of the global AI hype, far more electricity will flow into the training and operation of new artificial intelligences in the future.
The experts at the Dresden-based programming company "Zeiss Digital Innovation" (ZDI) are convinced that the software that runs on all these computers could be a key factor in getting this serious ecological "side effect" of digitalization under control. The Saxon Zeissians have therefore developed a software solution under the focus topic "Sustainability in software development" organized a so-called Thingkathon. A dozen developers, programmers and other creative minds from Germany, Estonia, England and India took part in this programming and thinking marathon in Dresden. In spontaneously assembled teams, they developed initial solutions for economical and sustainable computer programs within three days. The tenor of the winning designs: in order to reduce the energy consumption of software during operation, but also during its creation, it must first be possible to measure this consumption. And another finding of the intercultural inventors: not everything that German engineering is able to create in terms of fail-safe technology is necessarily ecologically efficient.
New perspectives through an intercultural view from the outside
Zeissian Hendrik Lösch, who had helped formulate the challenges for the Thingkathoners, was downright fascinated by the solutions found afterwards: "We took away some wonderful and applicable results from this competition, some of which we want to pursue further in our company," he says. The working atmosphere was great and it once again showed what new perspectives can suddenly open up through the interdisciplinary and intercultural view from outside.
Archetypal for many other decentralized, networked electronic devices with software on board, such as those designed by Zeiss, ZDI had chosen a scenario for the competition that is typical in German drugstores such as "dm": photo acceptance stations where customers enter their pictures via cell phone, memory stick or other means in order to have them printed out. The software for this is installed partly on the devices and partly in the Internet-connected cloud data centers and also takes care of distributing the orders and returning the filled photo bags. Within three days, the teams in the Thingkathon had to find ways to reduce the power and general resource consumption of the stations on the software side - during operation, but also during programming.
However, it soon became apparent that many of the international participants in the competition were not familiar with photo stations of this kind from their own countries and first had to see them in a drugstore. It was probably mainly due to this unbiased view that the Estonian "Pro Expert" team suggested to the Germans that the stations should be reprogrammed so that they gradually switch off when the number of customers decreases - and conversely, a device only leaves this energy dusk when the last free device has just been occupied by a user. "You have to come up with the idea first," said Hendrik Lösch afterwards, as did Danny Städter from the "Smart Systems Hub Dresden", who helped organize the marathon. It is true that Zeiss does not build photo stations and needs such savings concepts more for ophthalmological devices or other medical technology. Nevertheless, the organizers are now considering forwarding this specific idea from the Estonians directly to "dm".
However, first place was ultimately won by the "Carbon Cutters". In this team, three students from the HTW and TU Dresden as well as Rico Pommerenke from the Dresden software company "Otto Group Solution Provider" (OSP) joined forces and focused on the question of how economical software and software development can be quantified at all. They therefore devised a measurement system for the energy consumption of photo stations and other programmable systems. As an example, they then showed how the power consumption of different software versions can be compared with each other until the optimum program version is found.
"The topic of sustainable programming has long been on our agenda at OSP," says Rico Pommerenke. "That's why I was immediately interested in this Thingkathon." And it turned out just as he had hoped: "I took away a lot of ideas for my work from brainstorming with the others. Sometimes my head was really buzzing with ideas. Maybe we'll do a hackathon like this internally in our company one day."
Incidentally, the Dresden-based Otto subsidiary and ZDI are not the first and only companies in which the topics of "software" and "resource consumption" are increasingly being considered together: In view of high energy prices, more and more companies are looking for ways to curb the hunger for electricity in their information technology infrastructures. In addition, there are growing sustainability reporting obligations for the economy. "In the past, many have paid too little attention to this topic," says Hendrik Lösch. "However, software companies in particular are facing this challenge earlier than others." One reason for this is that customers are already asking software companies today how they can meet their reporting obligations and ecological targets tomorrow with the programs supplied. For this reason, the Dresden Thingkathon was intended to provide initial prototype solutions, but also to initiate a paradigm shift in the programming community: "The idea is to sensitize people to think about resource consumption as early as the software development stage," explains Danny Städter.
Researchers from Saxony have been working on this topic for some time
Experts have been concerned about the exploding energy requirements of the brave new digital world, into which our society is gradually transforming, not just since yesterday - especially in the microelectronics hub of Dresden: the Saxon cluster of excellence "Cool Silicon" has been systematically tackling the energy consumption of modern computer chips since 2008. And Prof. Gerhard Fettweis, who headed this cluster for a time, remembers it well: "20 years ago, I supervised a doctoral thesis in which we tried to build an 'energy-efficient compiler'." To explain: such "compilers" are a kind of interpreter between the program lines that humans design and the machine language that a computer chip understands. In this doctoral thesis, Dr. Attila Römer, who later became head of the Dresden-based positioning technology company "Metirionic", investigated how much energy each program line, each instruction, consumes - and how much this hunger depends on the previous program sequence. In times of extremely resource-hungry digital technologies such as Bitcoin and AI training, this old topic is now taking on a whole new meaning.
However, it is still not crystal clear how much electricity can be saved through optimized software and software development, for example. However, industry experts estimate that this could reduce energy consumption and ultimately also carbon dioxide emissions by ten to 15 percent - calculated for Germany alone, this would correspond to the annual energy production of an entire nuclear power plant. According to Rico Pommerenke from OSP, if it is possible to achieve sustainable software, this would not only be a certain cost advantage for the respective company, but would also have an important ecological dimension: the information technology industry has a "not inconsiderable influence" on global greenhouse gas balances and therefore offers "an opportunity to counteract climate change. Especially because our code and infrastructure are often not optimal: According to Intel, inefficient infrastructures and software are responsible for over 50 percent of greenhouse gas emissions from data centers."
