Middleware in a box

Imagine you can have a tinny virtual machine with an abiquo middleware exposing its resources to everyone:

• 

  Reduce vulnerability in grid nodes against out of control processes (they can destroy the virtual machine information). Safer for the user.

• Homogeneous execution environment for all nodes.
• Add cloud computing benefits to grid computing benefits.

Imagine you can have a light virtual machine (downloadable from the Internet). Easy to install, multiplatform and featuring all abiquo functionalities.

Last Friday, abiquoLabs accomplished this goal. The first prototype of abiquo Platform over a customized virtualized Linux within a VirtualBox and… this box… in Norway :).

Why we choose VirtualBox? Basically because we believe VirtualBox is the better end user virtualization solution, easier for final users.

After this.. we are starting to think about different cool solutions and user applications… they will be here soon ;)

Tags: Abiquo, Middleware, VirtualBox

Abiquo + siesta: Abisiesta

Make a startup great by working at work ! An Abiworker working offline:

But… what is abiquo?

This is a question people are wondering and they always try to ask us.

Cloud Computing? Grid Computing? The Internet of things? M2M?…

The response for abiquoLabs is easy:

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Abiquo is an Open Source platform that allows interconnecting ANY KIND OF DEVICE in the same infrastructure to create INTELLIGENT NETWORKS. From huge servers to tiny sensors, from Cloud Computing to Wireless Sensor Networks. Abiquo allows any developer to create his own dream application in an easy way.

Yes, we know that it is a very generic concept but we like big challenges… do you want to help us?

The Open Comunity is comming soon…

Tags: Abiquo, Open Source

Two new costumers for the next quarter

This month we’ll be starting two important projects:

• Trovit , one of the largest vertical search engines will use abiquo platform. Combining the experience of the abiquo team in distributed technologies (Hadoop, Map Reduce, Katta, Bailey, etc) and cloud computing solutions to create a high scalability and high availability system. All monitorized this with a centralized web portal to save management costs.

• On the other hand, abiquo team is launching an ambitious project in Cornellá de Llobregat (Barcelona, Spain). The next generation of grid architectures: The Citizen Grid. A software platform that will not only offer Boinc like capabilities but also user interaction, P2P and social network generation.

We are extremely excited with these projects, completely different objectives sharing the very same platform, abiquo platform. We will keep you posted on the advances.

Tags: Abiquo, citilab, citzen, grid, searcher, social networks, trovit

NEOTEC grant awarded

Just a brief post to announce that we have been awarded with the NEOTEC grant. It’s a significant step in Spain, which will allow us to boost our operations. Expect interesting movements made by us in the next weeks :-)

Tags: neotec grant

Abiquo at the Wireless Sensing Demonstrator Showcase 2008

Last July 1st the National Physical Laboratory held its Wireless Sensing Demonstrator Showcase in Teddington, UK. It looked as a wonderful chance to show our product to the many people this event will gather. We had a demonstrator spot granted to show how our platform allows the development of hardware independent applications. This solves the problem of dealing with hardware heterogeneity at application level, shattering completely the vendor lock and making the replacement of an existing device or the integration of a new one a neat and simple procedure.

The chosen demo application was called Virtual Office and included:

• Sign in and out of the employees through RFID tags
• A WiFi camera taking pictures whenever someone signed in or out.
• Lightness, temperature and humidity ZigBee sensors
• A tailor made notification system, through Twitter, e-mail and Bluetooth to keep the boss up-to-date on those event wherever he is.

The dream of each and every one of the employees in this world :)

For each functionality, we involved not one piece of hardware but two. We had two different RFID tag readers, one USB based and another ZigBee enabled. Two ZigBee sensors from completely different vendors and also an stand-alone ZigBee-TCP gateway and a USB one. Leaving aside the cool and useful features of the application, its most outstanding point is its hardware unawareness. We did not go nuts duplicating the hardware, we wanted to show hardware swapping. The application ran smoothly regardless the hardware composition active in every moment.

After going through all the steps, having our demo draft accepted, writing an article introducing the platform and the demo and developing it we could not make it to Teddington. Unfortunately, I was the designated demonstrator and health reasons made me impossible to travel on that date. Although it was impossible to foresee it, it is always a pity when a virus (a real one) tears down everything the team build and ruins a great chance to show our product to the world.

No matter how hard we apologize, we will still be sorry for the troubles. From here, we want to congratulate the event organization for its care along all the process and also thank them for its kind understanding the situation. We hope next year will be better.

Intensive computing with the abiquo platform

A few months ago, Santiago (one of our java architects at abiquo) developed in one morning a simple application to render scenes on a grid, using the yafray command line application as backend.

Without our platform, this image is rendered in 30 minutes (approximately). The same rendering task, using seven desktop computers and our platform, is reduced to 3 minutes, i.e. ten times faster.

In the application you can decide how to split your task; In this case, the yafray initialization state slows the process down a little. For this reason, if you decide to divide the image into more squares the execution will take longer. On the other hand, by using little squares, you can send more work to the best computer. However, this application is only a demostration :).

In order to use the intelligent agents layer, the platform learns about the service and the nodes, and the developer can apply its knowledge to split the work in dynamic squares, to send bigger squares to the best computers.

You can check here a video demostration.

Maybe it’s time to remind the data mining example using an application we gridified on the research group at the university few years ago. Now it’s working with the abiquo platform. The video here :)

Tags: abiquo platform, intensive computing, render, yafray

Optimizing water consumption with abiquo

Abiquo Labs (our R+D team) presented a prototype of the m2m platform applied to the water consumption optimization.

Spain is a country where water shortages are becoming a problem and the people are beginning to feel the urgency of improving water consumption to reduce the water needs.

This simple example can be applied to watered gardens on any council in the world :). We used plants to illustrate the case inside the Citilab building.

The technologies:

We need to interact between sensors using Zigbee communication, Bluetooth router, a Bluetooth mobile and web services (Twitter and weather information).

The information generated by the system is displayed to the user on a Flex Application, on the mobile (through a Bluetooth message) or using twitter.

Abiquo platform:

It works like a plug and play system. Using generic connectors developed by abiquo the development is becomes just too easy. The connectors employed are the following:

• Bluetooth connector.
• Zigbee connector.
• Twitter connector.
• Weather connector.

It’s easy to set up (it only takes a few minutes). A developer can connect inputs and outputs almost transparently. He or she does not need to understand Bluetooth, Zigbee or the other technologies. He only connects the data to show the information in the different interfaces.

The schema:

The cool features:

Using the abiquo platform you can obtain the following benefits:

• You can modify the hardware and you don’t need to change the applications.
• You don’t have the hardware dedicated. The devices are connected to the same network and they can be used by other applications.
• Reduce the time to market of your applications and ease code reuse.

Future:

Abiquo is finding industrial partners and public institutions to develop the optimization of water cycle. An ambitious project where abiquo applys its concept of “distributed intelligence“.

The idea is to create a distributed and large wireless sensor network of low-cost sensors to control key places (greens, rivers, drains, etc.), connected to 2.0 webs to sensitize the citizen and connected to water utility industries and public administration to optimize the water consumption.

Please, you can send mail to contact@abiquo.com to ask us about the demo.

Tags: 2.0, Abiquo, bluetooth, m2m, water, web services, zigbee

Welcome to abiquo blog

After months forgetting our old blog, now it’s time to announce its rebirth. Months where the company has changed its name. Months where the development team has end the first version of our intelligent networks development platform,

Now it’s time to start showing the hard work done. This blog will be used to explain our development, important covered milestones and bussiness challanges.

We want to make the effort of write in English because it will be better for everybody. Apologies in advance for any possible mistakes that you might found. We will improve step by step. Our philosophy is to go bigger :)

If you have any doubt, do not be shy and ask more about us in contact@abiquo.com

Tags: Abiquo, welcome