These are example topics for Bachelor’s and Master’s theses. The concrete scope and methods are flexible and can be adapted to your interests and background. All projects combine practical software work with a clear focus on sustainability and energy efficiency in computing.

You are very welcome to bring your own ideas as well – I am always happy to discuss new project proposals.

The overarching goal of all topics and my work is to reduce the carbon emissions of modern digital infrastructure!

If you are interested or have questions, please feel free to contact me:

📧 geerd-dietger.hoffmann@uni-potsdam.de | hoffmag@htw-berlin.de

Global ping times

Location shifting can save considerable amounts of carbon through using “greener” electricity. But an argument people often have is that access times are not sufficient. There is public data on ping times between servers. The idea of this project is to take this data and then overlay the grid intensity. Like this people can chose their source country and see which country has the greenest grid mix while staying under a certain threshold. I have created a first visualisation based of the ping times under

http://carbonmap.sensationtech.com/

which can be used as a starting point.

Make testing carbon aware

Currently a lot of tests are run on every push. This is often not needed and a waste of resources. What I propose is to take the grid intensity into the testing pipeline. On every test we map code to tests. So we know which test tests which lines of code. When a new commit is pushed we check which lines have changed and then execute only these tests. Like this we can save real energy/ time. If the grid is very green we can do more tests if dirty we do less tests. Like this at some stage we should run all tests but only when the grid is “green”. I would use a language like python in which it is quite easy to get the mapping lines of code to tests. Also there is some previous work and a working system is not to hard so one can iterate on a functioning protoype.

The state of the German Internet

I want to look at all the websites that have a .de ending from an environmental sense. So

1. where are they hosted? Do we know if they are hosted with green power. What are the DNS a records, MX records?
2. do they follow rules of green software development. What rules can we apply to static html? https://patterns.greensoftware.foundation/catalog/web/ maybe size is a good proxy to go by?
3. Could you somehow measure all of them. How long would it take? What would be a good filter to look at the top n sites.
4. Maybe we could measure them with something like webnrg or co2js
5. Also it would be interesting to see how many have advertisement or something included.