Granola a power saving software for your computer

Introducing Granola a software to help save some energy from your PC, and in the while help the nature.

Granola site say:

“Granola will green up your Linux or Microsoft Windows computers by cutting energy consumption by up to 35%. This will not only save you money, but help to save the planet by reducing CO2 emisions. Granola will not turn off your computer or give you any noticable performance loss, and it is totally free! Do your part to save the planet by installing Granola.”

There has been a lot of effort in the electronics world to save energy and only use enough energy that is needed. A lot of electronics are coming with green computing enabled which saves a lot of power as compared to the normal electronics.

Granola can save upto 35% of power being used by the computer device. One other advantage of Granola is that it does not slow down the system. It’s very light weight on resources and starts working instantly after installation.

How does it work?

Taken from the Granola (formerly called MiserWare) wiki: -

“MiserWare ISPM is a set of algorithms for saving energy in a wide variety of workloads without affecting the performance of the system. These proprietary algorithms are at the heart of the current MiserWare products. In the MiserWare power management daemons, we leverage our ISPM algorithms to use dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technology. DVFS provides various power and performance settings for just about any modern processor, and when coupled with our algorithms can save significant system energy with no noticeable performance loss.”

So Granola saves energy by applying dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) to the CPU of a system, something akin to a "dimmer switch."

When a user is reading a website or working in a word processor, Granola scales down the power needed; when the CPU is running at full blast for creating charts and graphs or other computing-intensive processes, the software draws more power.

Installation

I've tested it on my Linux Ubuntu, Granola is available as a .deb file making installation a snap. Ubuntu versions supported are 7.04 through 10.04 (Feisty through Lucid), other Distro supported are Debian, RHEL, Fedora and Suse.

The software is available also for Windows up to windows 7, so tehre should be no problem in using it also in the Microsoft world.

Last thing

There are over a billion personal computers in the world.

Together, they consume hundreds of billions of kilowatt hours annually. If each of these computers ran Granola and reduced their power consumption by even 10 percent, it would be like taking 7 million cars off the road. Or planting 900 million trees. Or turning off 65 coal power plants.