Parasite: A System for Energy Saving with Performance Improvement in Networked Desktops

In enterprise networks, idle desktop machines rarely sleep, mainly because turning off the hosts will affect the internet connection. While a number of solutions have been proposed, few of them have jointly considered energy consumption and performance. In this paper, we consider the case of file downloading, which is one of the most common internet applications. A system called Parasite is proposed for saving energy while improving performance by exploiting task migration and redundancy reduction. With this system, file downloading will not be interrupted even when a PC switches to sleep. In particular, it allows a PC to sleep while continuing to run large file downloads. Moreover, by caching the downloaded files in the server, Parasite suppresses the reduplicate downloading effort and reduces the network traffic. The strategy of redundancy reduction used in Parasite improves the average speed while avoids the energy waste caused by repeated transmissions of downloaded files. Parasite does not require any hardware additions to end hosts, and can be realized purely by additional software. The effectiveness of Parasite is verified with promising experimental results.