EU's AXLE to drive open source "Big Data" analytics

The European Union is funding a consortium of researchers, academic organisations, and others to come up with ways to improve decision-making speed and quality when it comes to real world data sets. The AXLE Project is being run by the AXLE Consortium – comprising the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, the University of Manchester, the University of Ljubljana, and Portavita – and is coordinated by PostgreSQL experts 2ndQuadrant.

The funding for the project comes through the EU's FP7 programme for research and innovation investment. The plan is for the project to deliver a range of advanced analytical techniques for big data, with research into advanced hardware architectures, data visualisation and security. "We're very happy that the European Union has recognised the potential of the PostgreSQL database to provide effective database analytics for a broad range of business, research and public services," said Simon Riggs, CTO of 2ndQuadrant.

The research will be manifested as open sourced implementations in the PostgreSQL database and Orange data visualisation tools. The project aims to work with real-world data sets in the range of 10-100TB. The intention is to submit the project's first deliverables for inclusion in PostgreSQL 9.4, which is expected to be available in 2014, and to repeat the process in the following years.

(djwm)