During 2023, the foundations of the ASCENDER project were laid, led by Eduardo Quiñones, an established researcher in the Computer Science department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The name of the project is due to the Spanish acronym for Software Architecture for Continuous Computing Environments for the development, deployment and Execution of Extreme Data Analysis methods.
Thus, the objective of this project is based on integrating the most relevant technologies to allow the application of extremely large, constantly growing, scarce, dispersed and heterogeneous data analysis methods. To achieve this, the project will implement a software architecture for the development, deployment and efficient execution of complex workflows for knowledge extraction in a continuous computing environment.
After establishing the foundations for this work, and with the aim of increasing the dissemination of the project and future results, ASCENDER launches this July the website proyecto-ascender.com. With this, citizens will be able to easily access the generic information of the project, as well as the news and press that it generates, the brand, the use cases that it will implement and, in the future, the results obtained through publications, presentations, papers… all following the open science guidelines.
In terms of use cases, ASCENDER will implement three use cases to showcase the capabilities of its architecture, which will facilitate the development, deployment and efficient execution of advanced data analysis services with real socioeconomic and scientific value. To do this, the technology will be validated in two real pilots located in the city of Barcelona and in the Costers del Segre Denomination of Origin (DO) in Lleida.
The three use cases have ambitious but realistic objectives, in sectors relevant to Spain such as smart and safe mobility, sustainable and clean mobility in urban areas and precision agriculture for an improvement in crop production.
Finally, it is good to highlight that this project is part of the UNICO I+D Cloud program that has Ministry for Digital Transformation and of Civil Service and the EU-Next Generation EU as financing entities, within the framework of the PRTR and the MRR.