The Case for Energy Clarity

The rapid expansion of cloud computing, especially machine learning, is leading to a significant increase in the global energy footprint of computing. Improvements in the energy efficiency of hardware and infrastructure are nearing the point of diminishing returns, and system developers will soon be compelled to drastically improve the energy efficiency of their software. For that, it is essential to have energy clarity: developers/operators must be able to accurately and productively understand how the energy usage of their hardware and software is influenced by workload, configuration, and other factors. We propose energy interfaces as a way to achieve that clarity: an energy interface provides concise, accurate, actionable information about the "energy behavior" of a system, much like a functional interface does for its semantic behavior. Preliminary experimentation suggests that obtaining and using such energy interfaces is feasible. We believe that some form of energy interfaces will one day become as central to system building as functional interfaces.