Teams of English and German scientists are using this open-code tool, the result of the European Cloudbutton project.

A URV research team from the Department of Computer Engineering and Mathematics has led the European Cloudbutton project, which has produced the open-code tool Lithops. English data scientists at the Hutton Institute are using this tool to analyse the human genome while their German counterparts at EMBL (European Molecular Biology Laboratory) are using it to analyse metabolic health data. IBM is even using it commercially for its clients in the financial and banking sector. It enables the URV to process geospatial data from the European Sentinel II satellite and analyse maps of the whole of Catalonia in a few seconds.

The European Cloudbutton project was awarded 4.3 million euros to analyse mass data in the cloud. The project involves institutions such as IBM, RedHat, Imperial College London and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, among others. The coordinator of the European project, Professor Pedro García López, who also leads the CloudLab research group, whose members are experts in cloud technologies and digital transition, assures that Lithops “has already achieved great success worldwide”.

The aim of the project is to simplify the transition to the cloud for data analysts. The cloudbutton metaphor means pressing a button and executing the local machine code in an infinite supercomputer in the cloud. In this way, data analysts will not have to struggle with the high complexity of distributed systems deployed in the cloud. Using the technologies that have been developed for the project, the CloudLab research group is collaborating with the UK Health Service to analyse viral data from pandemics such as COVID over the next few years.

The researchers have received Next Generation funding to set up a health data analysis company (genetics, metabolomics). There is now a multidisciplinary collaboration between cloud experts (in this case through the CloudLab research group led by the researcher Pedro Garcia) and experts in metabolomics (through the MIL@b research group, led by the researcher Oscar Yanes).  A spin-off company will be created for analysing health data.