Towards a Benchmark for Software Resource Efficiency

Data centers already account for over 250TWh of energy usage every year and their energy demand will grow above 1PWh until 2030 even in the best-case scenarios of some studies. As this demand cannot be met with renewable sources as of today, this growth will lead to a further increase of CO2 emissions. The data center growth is mainly driven by software resource usage but most of the energy efficiency improvements are nowadays done on hardware level that cannot compensate the demand. To reduce the resource demand of software in data centers one needs to be able to quantify its resource usage. Therefore, we propose a benchmark to assess the resource consumption of data center software (i.e., cloud applications) and make the resource usage of standard application types comparable between vendors. This benchmark aims to support three main goals (i) software vendors should be able to get an understanding of the resource consumption of their software; (ii) software buyers should be able to compare the software of different vendors; and (iii) spark competition between the software vendors to make their software more efficient and thus, in the long term, reduce the data center growth as the software systems require less resources.