IBM Donates Quarks to the Open Source Community

IBM announced it has donated Quarks to the open source community. Quarks offers a standard way to do analytics at the edge, enabling organizations to do continuous streaming analytics from the center to the edge. Quarks offerings a programming model and runtime that can be embedded in gateways and devices. Quarks addresses existing limitations by analyzing data locally, on gateways or at edge devices.

The result is quicker time to action and reduced communications costs. Working in conjunction with centralized analytic systems, Quarks enables a common streaming analytic model across different kinds of devices using familiar tools. It runs locally analyzing the continuous streams of data coming from equipment, vehicles, systems, appliances, and sensors of all kinds.

Fueled by Internet of Things (IoT):
Internet of Things provides critical data to fuel the cognitive era. However, IoT challenges the limits of computing. To extract meaning from IoT data today, it must be transmitted over a communications network and be analyzed by a centralized application – a process that is both costly and time consuming. Open source solutions capture and find relevance in every data stream running at the edge of the network or gateway. Given the diverse nature of edge devices, local analytics is best addressed by an open community of software experts and device experts committed to expanding the capabilities and real-world use cases.

Rooted in IBM Research:
Quarks was designed by IBM Research, the same team that designed and built IBM Streams (ibm.com/streams). After 10 years of in market experience with streaming analytics, the IBM team decided to create Quarks as a lightweight open source offering to perform analytics at the edge and extend the streaming paradigm to the IoT devices. IBM expects clients to receive the following benefits from Quarks and will pull in open source innovations into the IBM Streams offering:

• Reduced Communications Costs Quarks locally separates the interesting from the mundane, so users don't have to send every sensor reading over a network.
• Local Action Quarks makes devices more intelligent enabling them to take immediate action.
• Learning from Related Devices Connected devices can become more intelligent by understanding related devices.

Additional information:
Quarks is now on Github, IBM has officially applied to Apache for incubator status of the project: http://quarks-edge.github.io/quarks/

Keywords: Internet of Things (IoT), Streaming Analytics, Intelligent Devices, Big Data, ARC Advisory Group.