Funded by the European Commission and involving 31 partners from 17 European countries, the €14 million CYBELE Innovation Action aims to transform agriculture with high-performance technology and big data, tested in real-life use cases.
As a high-volume sector with low operational efficiency, agriculture offers significant potential for innovation. CYBELE, named in honour of the ancient Phrygian nature divinity, will focus on the emerging field of precision agriculture, specifically precision livestock farming. The project aims to demonstrate how the convergence of high-performance computing, big data, cloud computing and the internet of things (IoT) can revolutionize farming, reduce scarcity and increase food supplies, resulting in social, economic and environmental benefits.
Launched on 28-30 January in Barcelona, CYBELE will develop largescale, HPC-enabled testbeds complemented by a distributed big data management architecture and data management strategy. It will provide access to datasets of different types from a wide range of sources, an HPC-enabled environment to support agri-food impact model experiments, and a range of services to extract knowledge from agri-food data. The aim is to allow stakeholders to use resources in a more environmentally responsible manner, improve sourcing decisions and implement circular-economy solutions in the food chain.
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) will play a significant role in this major international innovation project. Researchers in the Computer Sciences for Science and Engineering (CASE) department at BSC will support the development of the HPC-enabled testbeds, as well as drawing on their proven experience to create user-friendly data visualisation interfaces.
BSC Principal Investigator Fernando Cuchietti, Data Pre- and Post-Processing Group Manager, said: ‘Our role in the CYBELE project focuses on the data visualisations and interfaces which will allow test case users to easily exploit machine learning tools and results, and hence empower them to make the most appropriate decisions.’
The project will run for three years, ending on 31 December 2021.
Further information: CYBELE on the European Commission’s CORDIS website
About CYBELE
CYBELE (Fostering Precision Agriculture and Livestock Farming Through Secure Access to Large-Scale HPC-Enabled Virtual Industrial Experimentation Environment Empowering Scalable Big Data Anaytics) is a three-year Innovation Action funded by the European Commission, with a budget of €14 million.
Bringing together 31 partners from 17 European projects, CYBELE aims to demonstrate how the convergence of high-performance computing, big data, cloud computing and the internet of things (IoT) can revolutionize farming, reduce scarcity and increase food supplies, resulting in social, economic and environmental benefits. It has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 825355.