David Flynn27 April 2009, 10:25 PM
P2P pirates can do their bit to save the planet with Somniloquy – a tiny PC on a USB stick that piggybacks onto your snoozing PC’s network connection.
We know how you feel. You leave your PC awake all night in a mega download session (especially handy when your ISP restricts a chunk of your data allowance to an off-peak timeslot), and then you lie awake all night worried about the environmental chaos you’re wreaking on our fragile planet.
The desktop is torrenting while you’re tossing and turning. “If
only there was a way to download all those TV shows and music and at the same time reduce my carbon footprint!” you cry in anguish!
What you need is Somniloquy. Not the medical condition that means to talk in one’s sleep, but rather the aptly-named USB stick which lets your PC ‘talk’ to the Internet as it sleeps.
A canny project cooked by computer scientists at the University of California and Microsoft Research of all people, Somniloquy is a prototype device which packs an entire low-power PC and embedded operating system onto a USB key.
Somniloquy packs a tiny PC into a USB stick that takes over your PC's network connection while the PC sleeps
“Somniloquy has a low-power processor, some memory, a lightweight operating system, and a small amount of flash to store data” explains Somniloquy inventor and UC computer science student Yuvraj Agarwal. “Everything is scaled down and extremely energy efficient.”
“Most of the tasks that people keep their computers on for – like ensuring remote access and availability for virus scans and backup, maintaining presence on instant messaging networks, being available for incoming VoIP calls, and file sharing and downloading – can be achieved at much lower power-use levels than (the computer’s) regular ‘awake’ mode” Agarwal says.
Somniloquy essentially takes over as the computer's presence on the network while the actual PC is asleep by operating at the computers’ network interface. In effect, it impersonates the sleeping PC to other hosts on the network.
The device can also wake up the PC if necessary. If the SUB key’s flash memory fills up during a movie download Somniloquy will rouse the PC from its slumber, transfer the data to the PC’s hard drive and then return the PC to its standby state.
Somniloquy requires at least one-tenth the power of an active PC, and in theory could be built onto a network card and embedded into the computer so that every PC could go sleepwalking – or rather, sleeptalking — on the Web.