Research in this area fcuses on green software. Recent research indicates that for each watt spent to power a server’s CPU, 28 watts must be fed to the data center hosting the server, due energy overheads and inefficiencies. This suggests that a small reduction of CPU usage obtained by running greener software can provide significant energy savings. Even more interesting, a reduction of CPU usage involves a corresponding reduction of the TCO of the data center with an almost linear relationship. Given that the TCO of large data centers can easily reach above $100 million, investing in green software design may prove economically efficient even for a single company. If the investment is made in the green redesign of packaged software with installations in multiple companies, benefits could even have a socio-economic impact.

Chiara Francalanci's research aims at understanding the consequences of traditional software development and maintenance approaches on the energy efficiency of software. Consistent and structured processes have been the foundation of traditional software development approaches for decades. The main goal of these methodologies has been that of “industrializing” the development process and, thus, reducing development costs by streamlining the software production process itself and increasing software modularity. The relationship between “software industrialization” and energy efficiency is analyzed by facing the following research questions: 1) Is software quality measured in terms of modularity an aid or a detriment to energy efficiency? 2) Is the use of modern programming environments, libraries, and higher level constructs an aid or a detriment to energy efficiency?