'Sleep Talking' PC’s Save Energy and Money
By: Microsoft /
Tags: energy savings, innovation
A group of scientists from Microsoft Research in the United Kingdom and the United States and University of California have developed a prototype that allows computers to run low-energy tasks while in sleep mode. This saves both energy and money.
Program Fast Facts
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Situation
People tend to leave their computers running most of the time in order to stay connected to the network, usually for non-power intensive tasks, but nevertheless consuming an excessive amount of energy.
Solution
A group of scientists from Microsoft Research in the UK, US and University of California have developed a prototype than enables PCs to perform some tasks while in sleep mode.
Benefits
- Energy consumption decreases from 85 watts to 4 watts.
- The CO2 emissions from the electricity used decreases significantly.
- The consumer pays less for his/her electricity bill.
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For personal or professional reasons, people tend to leave their computers switched on for most of the day and night. Business users do it to allow remote file access and consumers tend to leave them on for overnight peer-to-peer file sharing. However, reducing the energy consumption of PCs is becoming increasingly important due to rising energy costs and environmental concerns. While PC ’sleep states’ save energy, these are often disabled to allow ongoing networking tasks that must be supported.
A team of scientists from the University of California (UC) in San Diego and from Microsoft Research in Redmond in the US, and Cambridge, in the UK, have created a hardware prototype for PCs that enables a new energy saving state known as ’sleep talking’. Normally PCs can either be in ‘awake’ mode—where they consume power even if they are not being used, or in a low-power ‘sleep’ mode—where they save substantial power but are essentially inactive and unresponsive to network traffic. The new sleep talking state provides much of the energy savings of sleep mode and some of the network-and Internet-connected convenience of awake mode.
“We realized that 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 Voice over Internet Protocol calls, and file sharing and downloading—can be achieved at much lower power-use levels than regular awake mode,” said UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student Yuvraj Agarwal who contributed to the project during his internship at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK.
Following this realization, the team built a small USBconnected hardware and software plug-in system that allows a PC to remain in sleep mode while continuing to maintain network presence and run well-defined application functions. It supports instant messaging applications, Voice over Internet Protocol calls, large background web downloads, peer-to-peer file sharing networks and remote access. The computer scientists say their system is easily extensible to support other applications.
The computer scientists named their system Somniloquy, which means ’the act or habit of talking in one’s sleep’.
Somniloquy consumes 11 to 24 times less power than a PC in idle state, which could translate to energy savings of 60 to 80 percent depending on the model of PC used.
In fact, the system allows a PC to appear to ’talk’ to other hosts on the network, even though the PC is in sleep mode. If more computational power or resources present on the PC such as stored files are required, Somniloquy ‘wakes up’ the PC. The goal of Somniloquy is to encourage people to put their PCs in sleep mode more often, for example when they are not being used for computationally demanding tasks. “Reducing energy consumed by wall-powered devices, especially computing equipment, offers a huge opportunity to save money and reduce greenhouse gases,” said Agarwal.
Somniloquy’s low-power secondary processor functions at the PC’s network interface. It runs an embedded operating system and impersonates the sleeping PC to other hosts on the network. Somniloquy will then wake up the PC if necessary. For example, during a movie download, when the flash memory fills up Somniloquy will wake up the PC and transfer the data. When the transfer is complete,it will go back to sleep mode and Somniloquy will again impersonate the computer on the network.
The current prototypes work for desktops and laptops, over wired and wireless networks, and are incrementally deployable on systems with an existing network interface. They do not require any changes to the operating system on the PC, to routers or other network infrastructure, or to remote application servers. The researchers evaluated Somniloquy in various settings and found that it consumes 11 to 24 times less power than a PC in idle state, which could translate to energy savings of 60 to 80 percent depending on the model of PC used. In the future, Somniloquy could be incorporated into the network interface card of new PCs, which would eliminate the need for the prototype’s external USB plug-in hardware and bring computers to a new age of energy savings.
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Microsoft Research Cambridge was founded in 1997 and now numbers over 100 employees. The Cambridge lab conducts basic computer science research on a wide variety of topics, including machine learning, security, information retrieval, operating systems, programming techniques, networking and interaction technologies. Microsoft Research Cambridge maintains close ties to the University of Cambridge and many other universities around the world.