The URV develops 'Lithops', a massive data analysis tool in the cloud

2022-07-15 19:44:13 By : Mr. Tony Wang

A research team from the URV's Department of Computer Engineering and Mathematics has led the European project Cloudbutton, from which the open source tool called Lithops has emerged.English data scientists at the Hutton Institute analyze the human genome with this tool and it is also used by German scientists at the EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) analyzing health metabolomics data.Even IBM uses it commercially for its clients in the financial and banking sector.The URV processes geospatial data from the European Sentinel II satellite to analyze maps of all of Catalonia in a few seconds using this tool.The European project Cloudbutton received 4.3 million euros to analyze big data in the cloud.The project includes partners such as IBM, RedHat, Imperial College London or the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, among others.The coordinator of the European project, Professor Pedro García López, -who also leads the CloudLab research group in which its members are experts in cloud technologies and the digital transition-, assures that Lithops «has already achieved great global success ».The goal of the project is to simplify the transition to the cloud for data analysts.The cloudbutton metaphor means pushing a button and executing code from the local machine on an infinite supercomputer in the cloud.Thus, data analysts will not have to deal with the high complexity of distributed systems deployed in the cloud.Through the technologies that have been developed in the project, the CloudLab research group maintains collaborations with the British Health Service to analyze viral data from pandemics such as COVID in the coming years.The researchers have received Next Generation funds for the creation of a health data analysis company (genomics, metabolomics).A multidisciplinary collaboration has been reached between experts in the cloud (in this case through the CloudLab research group headed by researcher Pedro García and experts in metabolomics (through the YanesLab research group, led by researcher Oscar Yanes). will create a health data analysis spin-off company.