Greening an Existing Software System using the GPU

It has been estimated that about 2% of global carbon dioxide emissions can be attributed to IT systems. Green (or sustainable) computing refers to supporting business critical computing needs with the least possible amount of power. This phenomenon changes priorities in the design of new software and in the way companies handle existing systems. In this paper, we present the results of a project aimed at developing a migration strategy to give an existing software system a new and more eco-sustainable lease of life. In particular, we defined a strategy and a process for migrating a subject system that performs intensive and massive computation to a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) based architecture. We validated our solutions on a system for path finding robot simulations developed at the University of Basilicata within a research project. An analysis on execution time and energy consumption indicated that: (i) the execution time of the migrated system is statistical significant less than the original one and (ii) the migrated system reduces energy waste, so suggesting that it is more eco-sustainable than the original one. These findings improve our body of knowledge on the effect of using the GPU in green computing. This is definitively one of the most important contribution of our research.