Vikrant Kaulgud

Priyavanshi Pathania, Rohit Mehra, Vibhu Saujanya Sharma et al.

Large Language Models are rapidly gaining traction in software engineering, yet their growing carbon footprint raises pressing sustainability concerns. While training emissions are substantial, inference quickly surpasses them due to the sheer volume of prompts processed. This shift underscores the urgent need for accurate, prompt-level carbon measurement during inference to enable informed, sustainability-focused decision-making. To address the limitations of existing approaches, in this paper, we outline the guiding principles for a novel reference framework for LLM inference carbon estimation that can guide the design of future tools and provide a systematic foundation for advancing sustainability research in this domain. We also introduce SEAL, an early embodiment of these principles that leverages a multi-benchmark-driven approach for per-prompt carbon estimation. Its initial validation shows promising results, positioning SEAL as a foundation for standardized sustainability assessment across the LLM ecosystem.

Samarth Sikand, Rohit Mehra, Vibhu Saujanya Sharma et al.

Software sustainability is emerging as a primary concern, aiming to optimize resource utilization, minimize environmental impact, and promote a greener, more resilient digital ecosystem. The sustainability or "greenness" of software is typically determined by the adoption of sustainable coding practices. With a maturing ecosystem around generative AI, many software developers now rely on these tools to generate code using natural language prompts. Despite their potential advantages, there is a significant lack of studies on the sustainability aspects of AI-generated code. Specifically, how environmentally friendly is the AI-generated code based upon its adoption of sustainable coding practices? In this paper, we present the results of an early investigation into the sustainability aspects of AI-generated code across three popular generative AI tools - ChatGPT, BARD, and Copilot. The results highlight the default non-green behavior of tools for generating code, across multiple rules and scenarios. It underscores the need for further in-depth investigations and effective remediation strategies.

Rajrupa Chattaraj, Sridhar Chimalakonda, Vibhu Saujanya Sharma et al.

The utilization of Machine Learning (ML) in contemporary software systems is extensive and continually expanding. However, its usage is energy-intensive, contributing to increased carbon emissions and demanding significant resources. While numerous studies examine the performance and accuracy of ML, only a limited few focus on its environmental aspects, particularly energy consumption. In addition, despite emerging efforts to compare energy consumption across various programming languages for specific algorithms and tasks, there remains a gap specifically in comparing these languages for ML-based tasks. This paper aims to raise awareness of the energy costs associated with employing different programming languages for ML model training and inference. Through this empirical study, we measure and compare the energy consumption along with run-time performance of five regression and five classification tasks implemented in Python and R, the two most popular programming languages in this context. Our study results reveal a statistically significant difference in costs between the two languages in 95% of the cases examined. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the choice of programming language can influence energy efficiency significantly, up to 99.16% during model training and up to 99.8% during inferences, for a given ML task.

Samarth Sikand, Rohit Mehra, Priyavanshi Pathania et al.

While Generative AI stands to be one of the fastest adopted technologies ever, studies have made evident that the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) puts significant burden on energy grids and our environment. It may prove a hindrance to the Sustainability goals of any organization. A crucial step in any Sustainability strategy is monitoring or estimating the energy consumption of various components. While there exist multiple tools for monitoring energy consumption, there is a dearth of tools/frameworks for estimating the consumption or carbon emissions. Current drawbacks of both monitoring and estimation tools include high input data points, intrusive nature, high error margin, etc. We posit that leveraging emerging LLM benchmarks and related data points can help overcome aforementioned challenges while balancing accuracy of the emission estimations. To that extent, we discuss the challenges of current approaches and present our evolving framework, R-ICE, which estimates prompt level inference carbon emissions by leveraging existing state-of-the-art(SOTA) benchmark. This direction provides a more practical and non-intrusive way to enable emerging use-cases like dynamic LLM routing, carbon accounting, etc. Our promising validation results suggest that benchmark-based modelling holds great potential for inference emission estimation and warrants further exploration from the scientific community.

Janardan Misra, Vikrant Kaulgud, Rupesh Kaslay et al.

Despite ongoing advancements in quantum computing, businesses are still faced with the problem to decide if they would benefit from investing into this novel technology for building a business critical application. This uncertainty is not only owing to the limitations in the current state of the technology but also due to the gap between the level at which business applications are analyzed (e.g., using high level semi-formal languages) and the level at which quantum computing related information is currently available (e.g., formally specified computational problems, their algorithmic solutions with computational complexity theoretic analysis) to make informed decisions. To fill the discourse gap, in this paper, we present design of an interactive advisor, which augments users while deciding to invest into quantum software development as a plausible future option in their application context. Towards that we apply business process modeling and natural language similarity analysis using text-embeddings to associated business context with computational problems and formulate constraints in terms of quantum speedup and resource requirements to select software development platforms.

Janardan Misra, Vikrant Kaulgud, Gary Titus et al.

This is a companion draft to paper 'Software Clustering: Unifying Syntactic and Semantic Features', in proceedings of the 19th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2012). It discusses the clustering process in detail, which appeared in the paper in an abridged form. It also contains certain additional process steps which were not covered in the WCRE paper. The clustering process is described for applications with Java source-code. However, as argued in the WCRE paper, it can be seamlessly adapted to many other programming paradigms.