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USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps

Posted by kdawson on Mon Apr 27, 2009 08:47 PM
from the talking-in-your-sleep dept.
Networking Hardware
jangel sends us to WindowsForDevices.com for news on a prototype device created by researchers from Microsoft and UC San Diego. It's a USB-based NIC that includes its own ARM processor and flash storage, and can download files or torrent while a host PC is sleeping. As a result, its inventors say, the "Somniloquy" device slashes power usage by up to 50x. The device requires a few tweaks on the host OS side save state before sleeping. The prototype works with a Vista host but the hardware comprising the NIC is based on a Linux stack. Here is the research paper (PDF).
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Submission: USB-based NIC torrents while your PC sleeps by jangel (1189135)
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  • I suppose I am not (Score:5, Funny)

    by nnnich (1454535) on Monday April 27 2009, @08:48PM (#27740235)
    I had the realization that I'm not geek enough to care about posting on this topic.

  • I felt... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anenome (1250374) on Monday April 27 2009, @08:50PM (#27740253) Homepage

    I read the article, then I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of music executives cried out in terror and were suddenly calling their RIAA lawyers...

  • Perfect for the computer lab (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 27 2009, @08:53PM (#27740273)

    Plug it in at the end of the day, pick it up in the morning. RIAA/MPAA catches the traffic? No tracing it back to you.

  • No need. (Score:5, Funny)

    by w0mprat (1317953) on Monday April 27 2009, @08:54PM (#27740287)
    I already torrent furiously in my sleep.

  • 50x less? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Enry (630) <enry@w a y g a . net> on Monday April 27 2009, @08:54PM (#27740307) Journal

    Argh!

    It's one of the following:

    1/50 the power usage

    or

    a standard PC uses 50x the power of this NIC

  • KillerNIC? (Score:4, Informative)

    by bstreiff (457409) on Monday April 27 2009, @08:55PM (#27740313)

    Isn't this somewhat akin to what the much-hyped KillerNIC [slashdot.org] was all about-- a separate device to offload network activity (for example, BitTorrent downloads)?

    • Re:KillerNIC? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Vu1turEMaN (1270774) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:22PM (#27740545)

      No. Not at all.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by artor3 (1344997)

      This one works while your computer is in a sleep state. The KillerNIC does not. Sure, it could in theory, but the software to do so doesn't come with it, and no third party ever developed such an app.

      So while hardware offloading network activity is nothign new, software to run downloads while the computer is asleep is quite new, and quite nice.

      At a reasonable price, I'd consider getting one myself, just to save on power costs.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by blitzkrieg3 (995849)
      In a way this is the exact opposite. The KillerNIC is designed to offload network processing to a host OS on the NIC while the computer is on. It promises do deliver better performance by using more power.

      The NIC in the article acts a passthrough when the computer is on, and only starts doing its work when you turn the host PC off. It promises to deliver better energy usage by shutting the PC off.

  • Torrents going green?!?!!? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Rooked_One (591287) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:04PM (#27740405) Journal
    well... thats the color that little icon with a u on it is at least :P

  • There's another name for such a device (Score:4, Informative)

    by jdb2 (800046) * on Monday April 27 2009, @09:09PM (#27740455) Journal
    It's called the "Killer NIC" [killernic.com]. It's a PCI Express network card which offloads network packet processing to a custom embedded Linux distro running on a 400MHz ARM processor with 256MB of RAM, and oh, it works with Vista. As it's independent of the main CPU, it can run applications, such as a bittorrent client [bigfootnetworks.com], while the main CPU attends to other tasks while still acting as a NIC for the main CPU even if one of the on-board applications is also network oriented -- they call this "Flexible Network Architecture" [killernic.com] or "FNA apps." Oh, and did I mention that it has a USB port for storage of such applications and any associated data ( such as files downloaded via Bittorent ) on a USB flash drive?

    Another "great innovation" from Microsoft.

    jdb2

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Locutus (9039)

      Dell did it one step better and put the ARM chip in the laptop along side the x86 CPU. I forget what version of laptop does this but it's currently used for instant-On but has full network access and I guess it shares it with Windows since they said Windows can boot while using the ARM stuff.

      But as someone else stated, why not just put DD-WRT oh your router and let the torrents work from there.

      LoB

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by DragonTHC (208439)

        The killer XENO pro and Ultra WILL do this while the computer sleeps.

        though the device is pci-e and will require a BIOS that supports this function.

  • Other functionality (Score:5, Funny)

    by PopeGumby (1125507) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:10PM (#27740461)

    Yeah, but can it stay up all night looking up wikipedia for names of obscure early-90s dance acts and then scour all the torrent sites for full albums instead of just "Best of 90's Dance You Like Me Now?" compilations, and then stare at bittorrent, begging more seeders to come online to increase the speed from 0.01KB/s, and then say "screw it" and download the latest metallica and eminem albums on principle, delete them without listening to them, because it doesnt really like metallica or eminem, and then wander off to youtube to watch old WCW videos?

    If not, it can't truly duplicate my torrent experience.

  • Eh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ShooterNeo (555040) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:17PM (#27740511)

    The trouble is, this extra hardware will be a PITA to use. You'll have to have special versions of all your torrent software, IM software, etc that run on this device. The complicated way it works means that it will be heavily OS dependent, and vulnerable to all kind of glitches and problems. It's just too complex a technology to use in order to save a few watts.

    Worse, every time it wakes up your main machine's mechanical fans and hard drives, it increases the wear on those components.

    A much better approach is a multi-processor PC with the technology to completely shut down un-used CPU cores and reduce fan RPM, combined with SSDs for storage. Such a setup would let you continue to run your normal software - even let you use the PC for low powered desktop apps - and when you do something that demands more power, the system would wake up.

    Right now, AMD is much better for this : the low end, passively cool ATI graphics cards will run at a fraction of their normal clock-speed when idle in desktop mode. The current quad core AMD CPUs will severely underclock the unused CPU cores as well. It's not as good as a complete shut-down, but a decent AMD rig with variable speed fans (with an SSD of course) can now be built to run quietly on low power, but provide high performance on demand.

  • With external power it'd just be a bittorrent NAS. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SpazmodeusG (1334705) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:18PM (#27740523)
    Here's something that hobyists have been doing for a long time. Get a router or NAS that can run Linux and put all the services you want on it. You now have something that works when your computer is completely powered down (not just in S3 sleep mode), requires no USB ports and if you really want to you can enable wake-on-LAN on your computer and have the same ability to remotely wake your computer with a particular network message as this board gives.

  • This gives new meaning to the term (Score:4, Interesting)

    by enoz (1181117) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:25PM (#27740567)

    Zombie computers.

  • Torrents should be the router's job (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Dr. Spork (142693) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:30PM (#27740621)

    This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.

    Before you post links to routers with a USB port and a shoddy torrent client: I know about these, and it's a step in the right direction, but the interface needs to be much better. I should click on a torrent file on my bedroom computer and have that torrent be loaded into my router.

    I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.

    • Re:Torrents should be the router's job (Score:4, Interesting)

      by blitzkrieg3 (995849) on Monday April 27 2009, @10:18PM (#27740965)

      This is dumb. I mean, every house already has a running device with an ARM processor: their router! It would be so much more logical if torrents ran on the router than on a PC. For one thing, the router could throttle back the torrent if computers on the network were asking for data, and it could upload full bore when everyone is asleep.

      I like the idea that this thing accepts SD flash cards. Pretty soon, 8GB will be trivially cheap, and that could serve as cache. Periodically, as the cache fills up, the router could wake up a computer, transfer finished files to it and put it back to sleep. This wouldn't be hard - any proper geek could write a script to do this.

      This makes me wonder if this is already possible with a little hardware hacking and something like openwrt. The only piece currently missing is the "I'm going to bed" packet from the client to the router, and the "go back to sleep packet" you mentioned. When a client goes to sleep, the router takes over the connections using whatever the mechanism is in this paper, and starts caching rx packets.

      Then either when the buffer gets full or a certain pre-defined packet signature triggers the router, the router can send a replay of what happened at 100Mbps back to the client, which is all transparent to the OS.

      The caveat of course being that the network stack would need to be similar, you can't have the client machine thinking it sent a RST where the router didn't. And the router would need to decide which packets it can handle, and which are unimportant, and which need to cause a wakeup. But on the surface there isn't a lot stopping a POC of this kind of thing.

      • Re:Torrents should be the router's job (Score:5, Interesting)

        by SpazmodeusG (1334705) on Monday April 27 2009, @11:26PM (#27741405)
        Well if the router is always on anyway why have the services only switch to the router when the computer goes to sleep? Why not have the services permanantly running on the router?
        A lot of people run rtorrent on their WL-500g's and use an rtorrent front end on the PC. It works perfectly well. rTorrent continuosly downloads on the router and the front end transparantly displays information as if it was downloading locally. No moving of the service to have it running on the PC or embedded device is required.

        Really this board in the article has no advantages over a bittorrent capable router that i can see. It only allows 1 computer to make use of the services on the embedded device, so you'd need 1 for each computer. It takes up 2 USB ports when really it already has connectivity to the computer via the LAN anyway so why the need for USB at all? It still requires the modem/router to be on to work, so it uses more power than just a bittorrent router. It doesn't work when the computer is in hibernate or off completely, only when in S3 or above. It doesn't have any other storage options but the SD-Card...
        I could go on but you get the idea.

  • Neat concept (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Demonantis (1340557) on Monday April 27 2009, @10:42PM (#27741129)
    I like the idea it makes the computer much more efficient. The one design decision that confuses me is the choice of using the nic card. I guess it benefits those without a router, but couldn't you just develop a os for a nas that does the exact same thing. Main benefit is that it doesn't require a proprietary nic card designed for torrenting.

  • something similar (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tibman (623933) on Monday April 27 2009, @11:15PM (#27741333)

    My housemate has something similar. It's the typical NAS with two drives, but the cool part is the web interface. You can c&p torrent urls straight into it and even manage all your existing torrents through the web interface. So every computer in the house has a central torrent location. When it's time to play L4D we don't have to go around checking which machine is sucking all the band, we just log into the NAS and pause the torrents.

    Just went and looked at it. It's a D-link DNS 323 (company link: http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=509 [dlink.com]).

    I'd say the d-link beats the Microsoft research team's device (even though gumstix is awesome). No pc required and it can sit anywhere on your network.

    • Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (1223518) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:04PM (#27740397) Journal
      That is the boring bit. Were that what TFA is actually about, the correct response would be "Yawn. Get an NSLU2. Or a Gumstix, big deal."

      The interesting(hardly earthshaking; but interesting) bit is the work they did on interaction between the gumstix board and the full PC. Making a little computer do stuff is trivial, making common applications IM, bittorrent, and parts of the network state, running on the full PC work with the little computer in a reasonably clever way is rather less so.

      • Re:Wow. (Score:5, Funny)

        by somenickname (1270442) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:44PM (#27740727)

        Actually, I thought the interesting bit was the part where Microsoft Research was involved in creating a device that ran linux. I find it very hard to believe that they couldn't slim down Vista enough for this project.

        • Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (1223518) on Monday April 27 2009, @09:47PM (#27740747) Journal
          I'm pretty sure that if you work at Microsoft and were capable of getting Vista running on a 400MHz ARM board with 64MB of RAM, they would either promote you to "Emperor of Microsoft" or bury you in a shallow grave outside of town.

          • Re:Wow. (Score:5, Insightful)

            by nathan.fulton (1160807) on Monday April 27 2009, @11:27PM (#27741411) Homepage Journal
            I'm pretty sure that if you work at Microsoft and were capable of getting Vista running on a 400MHz ARM board with 64MB of RAM, they would either promote you to "Emperor of Microsoft" or bury you in a shallow grave outside of town.

            C'mon man, this is Microsoft. They will do both.

        • Re:Wow. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by Hal_Porter (817932) on Monday April 27 2009, @10:07PM (#27740879)

          PeerGuardian is a trap. Consider.

          Loads of people are torrenting at any one time. Probably the vast majority of them will torrent a few files and then stop. A small minority will torrent 24/7 maxing out their pipes.

          Now if you want to shut down filesharing it is this small minority that you want to target, firstly because they are a legally inviting target - it's hard for them to claim they are innocent if you can show they were maxing out their DSL connection 24/7. Also from a PR point of view it's better to sue the hard core pirates than the casual ones - you avoid headlines about grandmothers being sued for thousands of dollars because their grandkids downloaded a couple of songs. Last but not least they are the ones seeding most of the files because the casual torrenters download what they want and then shutdown the application.

          Normally of course there's no good way looking at one torrent to work out which torrenters are the hard core minority and which are casual torrenters.

          Enter PeerGuardian.

          The hard core torrenters will download and install it and the casual ones won't bother. Now you have an easy way to distinguish the two. Try to connect from a few IP addresses on the blocklist, and try to connect from a few that aren't. The last point is important - anti piracy organisations have lots of employees and could easily ask those employees to run some sort of tool from their home DSL connection, or they could buy a few DSL modems and stick them in the basement, or use a VPN to a pool of residential IP connections. I.e. it's quite easy for them to get hold of IP addresses which are not in their organisational IP block. So long as they don't attack torrents from those IP addresses there is no reason for those addresses to be blacklisted.

          So PeerGuardian provides no protection for downloaders and it provides very useful information to anti piracy organisations.

          If you don't want to get sued, don't seed and don't install things like PeerGuardian.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Rooked_One (591287)
      it is a "BIG FUCKING DEAL" when you consider people all of the world are leaving (and wasting power) their computers on to see "Watchmen" before it comes out.

      Or download a game that you play one time and decide - this sucks, so you save EVEN MORE MONEY.

      My guess is that you do not pay your own electricity bill.

    • Yo dawg! (Score:5, Funny)

      by jonaskoelker (922170) <jonaskoelker@g n u .org> on Tuesday April 28 2009, @01:34AM (#27742133) Homepage

      A tiny computer that can download files while another computer sits idly by.

      Yo dawg, we herd you like torrents, so we put a computer in your computer so you can torrent while you torrent.

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