LeanXcale is a participant of the Cybele EU project within the framework of the H2020 program. Through this collaboration, more than 30 universities and tech companies work together to bring new technologies like Big Data, IoT, and High-Performance Computing (HPC), to enhance agricultural efficiencies.
What is Cybele?
The project name derives from the ancient Phrygian goddess, who represented Mother Earth and crop fertility. As the goal of this project is to make agriculture more efficient using data, its name is very appropriate.
Participants of this project include tech companies of different sizes, from large international companies, like Bull and GMV, to deep-tech startups, like LeanXcale. Also, a group of European universities, including Stuttgart, Tampere, and Copenhagen, to name a few, round out the project’s academic team, which operates with a budget that is nearly 12,5 million euros.
Why is it important?
Agricultural facts that motivate this project:
- The need for food increases continuously.
- Approximately one-third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted every year.
- Global food waste and loss cost $940 billion per year.
- Annual food waste has a carbon footprint of 4.4 Gt CO2-equivalent, which is more than 8% of the global greenhouse-gas emissions.
- Annual food waste has a blue-water footprint of approximately 250 km3, which is 3.6 times the annual consumption of the US.
So, beyond typical economic challenges often considered, the Cybele project is working to make agriculture more efficient to combat current and future environmental and societal issues.
How does Cybele want to transform the sector?
With the expectation to accelerate the adoption of digital technologies across the agri-food sector, this project focuses on HPC, Big Data, Cloud Computing, and IoT to implement Precision Agriculture and Precision Livestock Farming methods.
Precision Agriculture uses sensors and satellite images to obtain data that represents crop yields and topographies, as well as moisture and nitrogen levels. These types of information enable the optimization of resource use, such as water or fertilizer.
Precision Livestock Farming leverages new technologies to monitor animals for the prevention of disease, making feeding more efficient, and improving meat quality and quantity. So, both animal comfort and food production can increase based on the use of these technologies.
What role does LeanXcale play in Cybele?
LeanXcale will lead the data management tasks for this project, providing the central database of the platform, migrating all pilot datasets to it and giving efficient execution of data analytics that might span across different datastores, internal or external to the platform. LeanXcale is a relational database manager with a key-value data engine that blends characteristics form SQL and NoSQL databases. This approach to key-value ingestion coupled with its patented scalability algorithm Iguazu makes LeanXcale the optimal database for IoT. In addition, its HTAP capabilities enable real-time analytics for faster and enhanced decision-making.