It's Code Green!

Here's how coders can join the save-energy campaign! If you can afford one error every 100,000 operations or so, you can already save a lot of energy. Up to even 90 percent!

A University of Washington project sees a role for programmers to reduce the energy appetite of the ones and zeroes in the code itself. Researchers have created a system, called EnerJ, that reduces energy consumption in simulations by up to 50 percent, and has the potential to cut energy by as much as 90 percent.

The basic idea is to take advantage of processes that can survive tiny errors that happen when, say, voltage is decreased or correctness checks are relaxed. Some examples of possible applications are streaming audio and video, games and real-time image recognition for augmented-reality applications on mobile devices.

Some experts believe we are approaching a limit on the number of transistors that can run on a single microchip. The so-called "dark silicon problem" says that as we boost computer speeds by cramming more transistors onto each chip, there may no longer be any way to supply enough power to the chip to run all the transistors.

The UW team's approach would work like a dimmer switch, letting some transistors run at a lower voltage. Approximate tasks could run on the dimmer regions of the chip. Today's computers could also use EnerJ with a purely software-based approach. For example, the computer could round off numbers or skip some extra accuracy checks on the approximate part of the code to save energy.

For sure, we need to cut the energy flab in every which way possible. In every walk of life, in every area.