Hi there,

We did a related experiment with VA Smalltalk and other languages like
Python, Java, etc... the context was how a JIT compiler can also help you
reduce energy consumption...which could be very important for IoT. We did
experiments on a Raspberry Pi, run some benchmarks and with some hardware
tool we were measuring the wattage.

You can see the whole presentation here: https://youtu.be/2xO0ohUNnug

Hopefully this can get you started with Pharo experiments.

Cheers,

On Thu, Oct 1, 2020 at 8:47 AM Jonathan van Alteren <
jvalteren@objectguild.com> wrote:

--
Mariano Martinez Peck
Email: marianopeck@gmail.com
Twitter: @MartinezPeck
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mariano-martinez-peck
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariano-mart%C3%ADnez-peck/
Blog: https://marianopeck.wordpress.com/

Hi Mariano,

Thanks for your response! I will take a look at the presentation.

I was hoping for some more concrete experience with the Green Software Lab benchmark. It's not a priority at the moment, but hopefully I'll get back to this in the near future. I'll report back with any findings.

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild B.V.
Sustainable Software for Purpose-Driven Organizations

jvalteren@objectguild.com
On 1 Oct 2020, 22:34 +0200, Mariano Martinez Peck marianopeck@gmail.com, wrote:

The problem is that what do you measure.
When you move computation from the CPU to a GPU for example does it consume less or more.
I think that such analyses are totally stupid.
Is a fast execution consume less? I have serious doubts about it.
Now if we measure how fast we drain a battery because of polling vs event based then this is different.

S.

Stéphane Ducasse
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr / http://www.pharo.org
03 59 35 87 52
Assistant: Aurore Dalle
FAX 03 59 57 78 50
TEL 03 59 35 86 16
S. Ducasse - Inria
40, avenue Halley,
Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne, Bât.A, Park Plaza
Villeneuve d'Ascq 59650
France

Hi Stéphane,

Thanks for your feedback. I agree that the usefulness of these results is limited. However, if we (Object Guild) want to make a case for energy efficiency, it can help if the language itself can be shown to be efficient as well.

For now, I think the efficiency will need to come from a good object design.

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild B.V.
Sustainable Software for Purpose-Driven Organizations

On 11 Oct 2020, 16:49 +0200, Stéphane Ducasse stephane.ducasse@inria.fr, wrote:

I do not know what is energy efficient nor how it is measurable.
Now our objectives is that pharo does not burn the batteries when doing nothing and we start to have that with the headless and idle vm.

this would presume that message passing is faster than branching.
And I remember that we had argument with hardware people about our reengineering pattern
on condition to polymorphism

Hi Stéphane,

I dug around a little bit regarding this subject and found that people are working to create software that is aware of its energy consumption. There is a Dutch university research group actively involved with this and related topics here: http://s2group.cs.vu.nl/mission/.

This article might be a good read on the subject: https://research.vu.nl/en/publications/a-manifesto-for-energy-aware-software

Is this something that could be of interest to Inria or the Pharo project?

What do you mean exactly with your last comment? I think that when distinctions in a domain are successfully made explicit at design time, this will improve performance at runtime and thus should also improve energy efficiency. How does that relate to your comment about message passing/branching/polymorphism?

Kind regards,

Jonathan van Alteren

Founding Member | Object Guild B.V.
Sustainable Software for Purpose-Driven Organizations

jvalteren@objectguild.com
On 13 Oct 2020, 16:49 +0200, Stéphane Ducasse stephane.ducasse@inria.fr, wrote:

Well if you accept that your web browser is going slower may be you will consume less energy.
Or may be your speedy web browser consumes less.

I skimmed over it and it is wishful thinking.
How can I engineer a system (besides using good algorithms instead of sloppy one) to consume less energy, if
we do not know what means energy aware:
At then this is what?
- Number of instructions executed, the least the better?
- What about missed caches?
- What about missed instruction pipelining?

For example on your mac when you unplug the cable you have a different card setup because the videos
card can consume more. So we can degrade certain operation.

But how to measure this seriously.

It depends how money is put on the table. :)

To me I’m sorry but I do not buy without serious measurement that
" distinctions in a domain are successfully made explicit at design time, this will improve performance at runtime “
Let us play the scientific here for a moment: do you have data? did you measure it? what are you biais in your measurement/experiment.

Now to reply to your question in OORP we promote that
case statement were bad that we it is better to use message passing.
Except that in some domains in some specific circumstances have case statement is faster.
Similarly they are domains where GC is a problem.

Stéphane Ducasse
http://stephane.ducasse.free.fr / http://www.pharo.org
03 59 35 87 52
Assistant: Aurore Dalle
FAX 03 59 57 78 50
TEL 03 59 35 86 16
S. Ducasse - Inria
40, avenue Halley,
Parc Scientifique de la Haute Borne, Bât.A, Park Plaza
Villeneuve d'Ascq 59650
France

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to talk about the energy efficiency
of a programming language.  For example, I've seen the run time of a
C benchmark go from 50 seconds to 1 microsecond when the optimisation
level was changed.  It doesn't even make much sense to talk about the
energy efficiency of the code generated by a specific compiler with
specific options: the underlying hardware counts too.  A colleague of
mine, looking at text compression algorithms for an information retrieval
engine, found that the fastest algorithm depended on just which x86-64
chip, even what motherboard, was in use.  It's obviously going to be
the same for energy efficiency.

So let's specify a particular physical machine, a particular compiler,
and a particular set of compiler options.  NOW does it make sense to
talk about energy efficiency?  Nope.  It's going to depend on the
problem as well.  And the thing is that people tend to do different
things in different programming languages, and different communities
attract different support.  There is no portable Smalltalk equivalent
of NumPy, able to automatically take advantage of GPUs, for example.

You can get some real surprises.
For example, just now while writing this message, I fired up
powerstat(8).  I had the browser open and power consumption was
about 12.8 W.  I then launched Squeak and ran some benchmarks.
Power consumption went DOWN to 11.4 W.
That is, Squeak was "costing" me -1.4 W.

If you understand the kind of things modern CPUs get up to, that
is not as surprising as it seems.  All it demonstrates is that
getting MEANINGFUL answers is hard enough; getting GENERALISBLE
answers is going to be, well, if anyone succeeded, I think they
would have earned at least a Masters.

On Tue, 13 Oct 2020 at 23:38, Jonathan van Alteren <
jvalteren@objectguild.com> wrote:

Here is an interesting article that could help as a start:

https://thenewstack.io/which-programming-languages-use-the-least-electricity/

Cheers,

On Thu, Oct 15, 2020 at 8:41 PM Richard O'Keefe raoknz@gmail.com wrote:

--
Mariano Martinez Peck
Email: marianopeck@gmail.com
Twitter: @MartinezPeck
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/mariano-martinez-peck
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariano-mart%C3%ADnez-peck/
Blog: https://marianopeck.wordpress.com/