Posters Galore: 'Do You Know The Impact of Your Software Choices?'

Frank Carver, PhD researcher at the University of Suffolk

"We have an insatiable appetite for software; more apps; more web and more data”, says Frank Carver, PhD researcher from the University of Suffolk. “Did you know that the ICT industry could use 20% of all electricity and emit up to 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025? And that templates represent 40-50% of the total bytes on the web – growing at a rate of approximately 6% per year?”

Frank’s PhD research aims to find ways for software developers, architects and managers to make smarter choices about the long-term global impact of their work.

An initial feasibility study investigated the range of differences between solutions to a common problem: generating web pages from templates. A representative sample of libraries were put through a series of capability and performance test scenarios; results were analysed and compared and tests run multiple times under different loads.

The most significant finding to arise from the work so far is the surprising variety in capabilities and performance between apparently similar software libraries. For example, for some common operations, there was a 10,000 times difference between the best and the worst performers.

You can view Frank’s poster content here and read about the future research he has planned for the study and how you can get involved.

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