The concept of Green Computing has been on my mind of late. Rasmus Lerdorf, who pioneered the PHP programming language (which this site utilizes), mentioned Green Computing in his keynote speech Simple is Hard (Aug 20, 2008). The talk focused more on optimizing web applications using various debugging tools and it was in this context that the Green Computing remarks below were made.

Attendee, meyers, summarizes Rasmus's views as follows:

if we could take all the web apps in the world and speed them up by 100, we could have a lot less data centers and servers - we used to count cycles when writing c code, and no one tracks that level today. Green computing - we need to save the trees (and kittens) by writing cleaner code - we'd need fewer servers...

Green Computing consumes fewer computational resources which reduces the need for more servers, power, physical space, retail cycles, etc.... A more fleshed out concept of Green Computing might be capable of acting as a powerful guide to best practice in computing? Green Computing is not wasteful of computational resources, is biomimetic, and is sustainable. These Green Computing principles can perhaps be applied to all levels of computing from hardware to software.