The University of Waterloo team in Canada, published on the Data Centre Dynamics website that the changes were made to the code that processes packets of network traffic.

Professor Martin Karsten and distinguished engineer Joe Damato modified 30 lines of code in the Linux operating system’s newest kernel, release version 6.13.

“All these big companies — Amazon, Google, Meta — use Linux in some capacity, but they're very picky about how they decide to use it," said Professor Karsten.

"If they choose to 'switch on' our method in their data centres, it could save gigawatt hours of energy worldwide. Almost every service request on the Internet could be positively affected by this,” he added.

The University of Waterloo is presently constructing a state-of-the-art green computer server room within its new mathematics building, further emphasising the importance of sustainability in computer science.

According to an announcement from the University of Waterloo, Karsten and Damato's collaboration was based on research originally published in the ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review. 

Their study explores the performance traits of network stack processing for communication-heavy server applications, revealing an "indirect methodology" to pinpoint and evaluate the costs of asynchronous hardware interrupt requests (IRQ) as a significant source of overhead.

"Based on these findings, a small modification of a vanilla Linux system is devised that improves the efficiency and performance of traditional kernel-based networking significantly, resulting in up to 45 per cent increased throughput," states the research.