USB-Based NIC Torrents While Your PC Sleeps

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).

Perfect for the computer lab

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Wow.

[2names]

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

Big. Fucking. Deal.

Re:Perfect for the computer lab

[MightyYar]

If it had Wifi, you could just stick it to the bottom of a table at your favorite coffee shop.

why get one of these when

[ickleberry]

there are so many other low-powered devices that will do so much more. like you could probably mod a router to run rtorrent and plenty of NAS already have torrent support. i have rtorrent running off a pico-itx board that also hosts my website,email,ftp,ssh,gopher,xmpp, a few python socket servers for random crap and if i had a script that would make me appear to be logged in on all those social networking sites 25/7 it would run this too.

having something that only supports bittorrent seems pretty limiting when you can have a fully featured unix CLI-based machine with plenty of room for expansion. but i said the same thing about a device that would "only play mp3's" in 2000

Re:Wow.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

[Rooked_One]

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.

Eh

[ShooterNeo]

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.

Re:50x less?

[artor3]

Yet you knew immediately what the phrase meant. Gee, it's almost like it got its point across with perfect clarity.

Re:50x less?

[Enry]

Yes, and I cn rd wrds tht r splld wtht vwls, but that doesn't make it right.

Re:Wow.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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:There's another name for such a device

[DragonTHC]

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.

Re:Wow.

[nathan.fulton]

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.

at home 37% leave computer ON to support IM/Email

[Browzer]

"In the office environment, 52% of respondents left their machines on for remote access, and 35% did so to support applications running in the background, of which e-mail and IM were most popular (47%)."

Never mind the fact that emails are saved on the server, but is this device is really necessary in case "An instant messenger (IM) client will require the PC to be on in order for the user to stay "online" (reachable) to their contacts."

So instead of telling a significant number of respondents that they really don't have to leave their computer ON to run background applications such as IM and email (unless of course you are running an IM/email server at work or home), the author does a cartwheel while holding a sermon on how to be green.

Now that everybody has get some green in order to be green, something similar but different, here is a bare-bone OS running on a daughter card (PCIe) which allows secure access to the host's hardware even when the host is OFF but the motherboard still has power. http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/smdrac3/drac5/OM53/en/ug/racugc1.htm#31825 [dell.com]. Works with Dell. A must if you don't have unrestricted physical access to your servers, and every once in a while the main power cycles but your servers don't boot/reboot automatically.

Small correction to the main article, a couple of the authors are from University of California, San Diego and not University of San Diego.

Read TFA

[rdebath]

It might be linux, but it's still crap.

• It turns itself off when the host turns on.
• It cannot act as a router
• It cannot act as a bridge or half bridge
• It cannot bond it's ethernet to the host's ethernet.
• It only works with specially modified applications that talk to a windows vista driver.
• It only does anything when the host is in 'S3' suspend, even if given external power.

Re:KillerNIC?

[Myrcutio]

not quite, the KillerNIC was simply a misguided attempt to shave off a few milliseconds of latency for poser *cough* i mean hardcore gamers.

Which was always funny because they assumed that the 1/200th of a second faster latency would show up on their 120hz monitor, or relieve a few CPU cycles on their overclocked 4ghz quad-core processor. Imagine how many soap-on-a-ropes you could buy these fools for that same $170

This little usb gadget actually looks cool, a bittorent downloader that uses next to no power.

Re:Wow.

[Hal_Porter]

Too bad that torrent clients and the bit torrent protocol in general require you to seed. Tit for tat protocol remember. If you want the data, you have to share the data. Well, at least if you want it in this century instead of 4GB or more @ 1kb/s (WoW and AoC, I am looking at you). Did you even have any idea at all how Bittorent works?

If I stop seeding once I have the file it doesn't affect the download time at all, it's not like people bear a grudge against my IP address. Not that they could actually, it's dynamic.

But seriously...some protection is better than no protection at all, and your fallacious argument about suing grannies is just silly. They've sued DEAD PEOPLE.

Yeah, and it was a PR disaster and didn't achieve anything. If I were them I'd concentrate on finding hard core pirates and targetting them.

Lots of home NAS already do this

[AliasMarlowe]

Most home NAS devices are headless linux servers, and many of them support taking over a torrent download when you shut down your PC. Or you can start a torrent/ftp/whatever download directly onto it in the first place. Maybe a home NAS uses more power than a USB stick, but much less than a typical PC or even a laptop. They also often have a full LAMP stack and much more storage than a USB stick thingy.

Re:There's another name for such a device

[jdb2]

While that may be true with current revisions, I see no reason why it couldn't continue to operate off of +5V standby power, or, failing that, a wall-wart. If my power supply [thermaltakeusa.com] is a typical example, then there's at least 15 watts available on the +5VSB rail when the computer is in S3 sleep. It takes no great leap of imagination to implement switching to an alternate power source when a change in the ACPI power state is observed. The only reason this "Somniloquy" is able to operate while the computer is in stanby/sleep-mode is the fact that there is still bus power supplied to the USB ports.

jdb2