Company

Resource-efficient software since 2015

RETIT stands for “Resource Efficient Technologies & IT Systems” and was founded in 2015 as a spin-off from the Technical University of Munich. The name was the plan from the start: using computing resources sparingly.

For a long time that mostly meant performance: shorter response times, fewer servers, lower license costs. Today the same measurement counts twice: once you know an application’s resource consumption, you can derive its energy use and its CO₂-eq emissions from it. Performance work and sustainability draw on the same data.

Our work builds on the research of founder Prof. Dr. Andreas Brunnert, who also teaches at Munich University of Applied Sciences. The methods we apply keep evolving through exchange with research and standardization, among others around the Software Carbon Intensity defined in ISO/IEC 21031. Where we take part in that work is listed further down.

What sets us apart from estimates

Many statements about the CO₂-eq emissions of software rest on extrapolations across whole servers or data centers. We measure where the consumption actually arises instead: at the individual component or transaction.

The calculation follows the Software Carbon Intensity defined in ISO/IEC 21031:

SCI = ((E × I) + M) per R

E is energy consumed at runtime, I the carbon intensity of the electricity, M the embodied emissions of the hardware, and R the functional unit. What counts as the functional unit depends on the application: an API call, a user session, a processed record.

To do that we build open tooling, first among them an extension to the OpenTelemetry Java agent that records compute time, memory, network and storage access per transaction, be it an API call, a batch run or a background job, without touching your application code.

opentelemetry-javaagent-extension on GitHub