Here’s a bit of nifty tech for you, a computer within a computer to save you money.  Microsoft Research and the University of California revealed what they call Solimniquy in their NSDI 2009 paper a couple of weeks ago, and while there’s not much new going on in terms of technology, it’s the implementation that’s got people saying “I want one.”

Solimniquy (which means the act or habit of talking in one’s sleep) is a small integrated device which would be a part of the network stack on a standard PC. While a computer is awake, Solimniquy quietly passes on all traffic between the application layer and the network interface card (NIC) and everything is as it should be, however the real innovation comes when your computer goes in to sleep mode.

Solimniquy acts as a network buffer and contains an integrated operating system to maintain a stateful list of active TCP and UDP ports and their corresponding applications. When the NIC receives traffic destined for the host computer, Solimniquy grabs the packets and responds that the packets were received properly, then dumps them in an on chip buffer. When the buffer is full or certain traffic requires urgent action, Solimniquy wakes up the computer and dumps the buffer to the network stack. To the computer and running applications, it’s as if the network connection was never turned off and they wake up from a nap they never knew they were having. Once the buffer is empty, Solimniquy puts the computer back to sleep to save energy.

Test runs so far have yielded an average power savings of 60%-80% with no lost data. At this point it’s just a proof of concept, but the potential is amazing. I no longer have to decide between getting that latest download finished while I sleep or saving money. I can save money in my sleep!

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