On Haskell and energy efficiency

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2019

Authors

Lima, LG (Author) Other; Soares Neto, F (Author) Other; Lieuthier, P (Author) Other; Castor, F (Author) Other; Melfe, G (Author) Other; Joao Paulo Fernandes (Author) Other

Journal

Title: Journal of Systems and Software

Vol. 149

Pages: 554-580

ISSN: 0164-1212

Publisher: Elsevier

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 5 Citations

Scopus - 5 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00Q-6W3

DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2018.12.014

Abstract (EN): Background: Recent work has studied diverse affecting factors on software energy efficiency. Objective: This paper attempts to shed light on the energy behavior of programs written in a lazy, purely functional programming language, Haskell. Methodology: We conducted two in-depth and complementary studies to analyze the energy efficiency of programs from two different perspectives: strictness and concurrency. Results: We found that small changes can make a big difference. In one benchmark, under a specific configuration, choosing the MVar data sharing primitive over TMVar can yield 60% energy savings. In another benchmark, TMVar can yield up to 30% savings over MVar. Thus, tools that support developers in refactoring a program to switch between primitives can be very useful. In addition, the relationship between energy consumption and performance is not always clear. In sequential benchmarks, high performance is an accurate proxy for low energy consumption. However, for one of our concurrent benchmarks, the variants with the best performance also exhibited the worst energy consumption. We report on deviating cases. Conclusions: To support developers, we have extended existing performance analysis tools to also gather and present data about energy consumption. Furthermore, we provide a set of guidelines to help Haskell developers save energy.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 27