System
carries PC soul
By
Kimberly Patch,
Technology Research NewsIt can take a good amount of time to sort through computer settings to get the system environment and those of all the programs you use to look and act exactly as you wish. In a world where the number of computers a typical person uses is on the rise, it is increasingly important to be able to transfer personal settings and data among machines.
The concept of transferring settings and data to any computer you happen to be using is not new. Several portability technologies have come into play over the years, starting in the '80s with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's network-based project Athena, and more recently with portable disk drives and Web-based services like GoToMyPC.
Researchers from IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center have improved the portable disk approach with a solution that neatly splits a computer into body and soul. The body consists of any given computer, and the soul a user's personalized computer environment of data, applications and settings.
SoulPad is a portable USB disk that houses programs, settings and data, and software that automatically sets up the user's application and data environment, including all system settings, when it is plugged into any computer.
When the user plugs a personalized SoulPad into a computer, the computer boots from the SoulPad to put the user exactly where she left off when she last used the SoulPad.
The term SoulPad alludes to separating a PC into a body consisting of a processor, memory, keyboard, and display, and a soul consisting of data, applications, and settings, said Ramón Cáceres, a research staff member at IBM Research. "The soul is carried on a small portable device and reincarnated on any one of a large class of PCs," he said.
The device could be used by mobile workers to carry work between home and office, and to switch among different devices, said Cáceres. "While traveling, the user can attach his SoulPad into a lighter laptop, and switch back to a more powerful laptop while not traveling," he said. "Similarly, an insurance worker could insert his SoulPad into a tablet PC for on-site appraisals, and then into a desktop PC for other work."
The device could also enable more people in developing regions to benefit from computing technology, said Cáceres. "Shared computing facilities are popular in developing regions because a number of factors inhibit many people there from owning PCs," he said. "People could instead owns smaller and cheaper SoulPads, and borrow or rent PCs from a community center, Internet cafe et cetera."
Today's portable USB 2.0 disks hold upwards of 60 gigabytes, fit easily in a shirt pocket, and cost around $150. The SoulPad concept could eventually be implemented using other types of portable storage devices, according to the researchers. Flash memory devices of several gigabytes are small enough to fit on a keychain.
SoulPad taps a larger computer's processor, memory, input devices like the keyboard and mouse, and output devices like the display to allow the user to run the software stored on the personal device. "SoulPad exploits the widely deployed ecosystem of standard PCs, and does not require those PCs to have network connectivity, preinstalled software, or even disks of their own," said Cáceres.
To do this, the device uses an auto-configuring operating system and suspended virtual machine software. The suspended virtual machine software allows the user to interrupt a computing session at any point, including views with open windows and running applications, and resume it later on whatever machine the SoulPad is connected to. "The insight of layering a virtual machine on auto-configuring operating system was key to the SoulPad effort," said Cáceres.
SoulPad's software consists of the Knoppix auto-configuring version of the Linux operating system, the VMware workstation virtual machine monitor and virtual machine, and the windows or Linux operating system running on the virtual machine. Virtual machines software emulates computer hardware in order to shield the operating system from vulnerabilities in the actual hardware or to allow operating systems designed for one type of hardware to run on another.
The researchers' prototype also includes software that encrypts the disk partition that holds the virtual machine images, and never writes to the internal disk on a PC it is connected to, eliminating the risk of accidentally leaving sensitive data on a PC after disconnecting.
The prototype also allows the user to designate one or more personal computers to automatically perform incremental backups of the data on the SoulPad every time the SoulPad connects to that personal computer, making it possible to recover the user's data if the SoulPad device is lost or stolen.
The combination of the virtual machine and external hard drive slows application speed down by about 27 percent, according to the researchers.
The prototype takes longer to suspend and resume a session than it takes for a typical computer to go into and out of hibernation or to shut down, then reboot. The SoulPad takes about 26 seconds to suspend a session and 134 seconds to resume a session on another computer. A typical ThinkPad running Windows XP takes about 27 seconds to go into hibernation, 27 seconds to resume from hibernation, 40 seconds to shut down, and 50 seconds to boot up.
The prototype works on personal computers that are configured to boot up from USB devices and that have more than 256 MB of memory, said Cáceres.
The researchers' next steps are to make the device faster and easier to use, and to increase the number of devices that work with SoulPad, including portable music players, mobile phones and digital cameras, said Cáceres. "People have wanted ubiquitous access to a consistent computing environment since the birth of interactive computing," he said. "Our overall aim is to create an easy-to-use technology that can have broad impact," he said.
Cáceres research colleagues were Casey Carter, Chandra Narayanaswami, and Mandayam Raghunath. The researchers presented the work at the 3rd International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services held in Seattle, Washington June 6 through 8, 2005, where it was awarded best paper. The research was funded by IBM Research.
Timeline: Unknown
Funding: Corporate
TRN Categories: Operating Systems
Story Type: News
Related Elements: Technical paper, "Reincarnating PCs with Portable SoulPads," the 3rd International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services, Seattle, Washington, June 6-8, 2005
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August 10/17, 2005
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