Edge computing company SWIM Inc., also known as SWIM.AI, today revealed plants to open-source much of its technology and tools.

SWIM came to attention last year when it raised a $10 million funding round to build out its software stack for “internet of things” and other edge devices. The platform combines local data processing and analytics, edge computing and machine learning to deliver real-time business insights from data produced by edge devices.

SWIM’s platform integrates a complex set of software that includes data collectors, analytics, message brokers and databases, which are the essential components necessary for analyzing streaming data from edge devices. It means that developers don’t need to worry about managing all of these separate tools and can instead focus on building applications.

One of the unique aspects of SWIM’s software is that it can gather data from IoT devices and create what are called “digital twins” of those devices, which can learn on their own and make predictions.

Digital twins are defined by analyst James Kobielus of SiliconANGLE sister research firm Wikibon as data constructs that mirror specific physical entities and thereby help to manage them, either through remote connection or through autonomous local operations.

SWIM said its digital twins can interoperate in a mesh architecture and support various autonomous and cooperative workloads. They also can find hidden patterns in data, predict future behavior of devices and autonomously trigger fast actions at individual or multiple coordinated edge devices, the company said.

SWIM co-founder and Chief Architect Chris Sachs and Chief Technology Officer Simon Crosby appeared on SiliconANGLE Media’s video studio theCUBE last April and spoke about the ability of digital twins to guess what might happen next in a particular scenario, then observe what actually happens and correct its predictions accordingly.

“Whether it’s a … traffic light trying to predict when it’s going to change, when cars are going to show up, when pedestrians are going to push buttons, or it’s a machine, a conveyor belt or a motor in a factory trying to predict when it might break down, you can learn from these … very specific models of how they’re going to evolve, and you can play reality forward,” Sachs said.

The open-source version of SWIM’s platform includes the digital twin capabilities, as well as a runtime for building and running apps. There’s also a user interface framework, a software development kit and a client for building streaming visualizations and embed UI components into existing apps.

“We want to enable the developer community to find new uses for SWIM, whether in SaaS, IoT or on-premise applications,” Crosby told SiliconANGLE. “By making an open-source version of SWIM available, developers can now take advantage of SWIM’s advanced features and can contribute to the common SWIM code base with rich new feature sets that can address a wide variety of end-user application needs.”

Crosby said SWIM is also throwing some key application “patterns” for edge computing use cases into its open-source bundle. These include telemetry, traffic prediction and public transit tracking patterns. “Developers can easily adapt these applications to match their own needs to quickly add real-time ‘edge intelligence’ superpower to their applications,” he said.

SWIM also comes with application programming interfaces powered by its WARP protocol. It enables developers to integrate data streams and their insights with existing user interfaces and applications. Developed by SWIM as an upgrade to HTTP, the WARP protocol enables the creation of bidirectional streaming links.

“Stateless, REST-based architectures are quickly overwhelmed by high data volumes and storage costs,” said Sachs. “By the using WARP protocol, SWIM provides a highly efficient, stateful way to manage streaming data and to build applications that are continuously in sync with the real world.”

SWIM said its software is being made open source starting today, with its platform available to download via the SWIM community portal. The company also sells an enterprise grade version of its platform called SWIM EDX, which comes with added monitoring, management and security features.

Image: SWIM.AI