Bruce, BR; Petke, J; Harman, M; Barr, ET; (2019) Approximate Oracles and Synergy in Software Energy Search Spaces. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering , 45 (11) pp. 1150-1169. 10.1109/TSE.2018.2827066.

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Abstract

Reducing the energy consumption of software systems though optimisations techniques such as genetic improvement is gaining interest. However, efficient and effective improvement of software systems requires a better understanding of the code-change search space. One important choice practitioners have is whether to preserve the system & #x0027;s original output or permit approximation with each scenario having its own search space characteristics. When output preservation is a hard constraint, we report that the maximum energy reduction achievable by the modification operators is 2.69% (0.76% on average). By contrast, this figure increases dramatically to 95.60% (33.90% on average) when approximation is permitted, indicating the critical importance of approximate output quality assessment for code optimisation. We investigate synergy, a phenomenon that occurs when simultaneously applied source code modifications produce an effect greater than their individual sum. Our results reveal that 12.0% of all joint code modifications produced such a synergistic effect though 38.5% produce an antagonistic interaction in which simultaneously applied modifications are less effective than when applied individually. This highlights the need for more advanced search-based approaches.

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