Exploring the Energy Consumption of Some Typical Applications: The Case of Sorting Algorithms

Minimizing the energy consumption of software solutions is a pivotal component in the realm of Green IT. Current leading-edge solutions often present limited methodologies for monitoring the energy consumption of a device or process. In this research, we introduce an energy monitoring framework to investigate the power usage of several widely-used applications, comparing them based on their respective complexities. Our method employs POWERAPI, an operating system-level library, to assess the energy consumption of processes across multiple dimensions, such as CPU and network usage. To gain insights into the potential energy inefficiencies of existing software, we have leveraged this library to analyze how algorithmic choices influence energy consumption. Our preliminary analysis focused on five distinct sorting algorithms. We employed the PowerAPI library to track the energy consumption of individual applications, thereby gaining an enhanced insight into the correlation between algorithmic efficiency and energy usage.