The kick-off meeting of the European project “ExAscale ProgramIng models for extreme Data procEssing” (ASPIDE) took place during on July 9th and 10th at the Carlos III University of Madrid (UC3M). The ASPIDE project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The project started officially on June 15th of 2018 and it will have a duration of 30 months. The main goal of the ASPIDE project is to develop software, monitoring techniques, and data management tools for systems and activities that require the processing of very large amounts of data.  The ASPIDE project is coordinated by researchers of the UC3M and joins a consortium of research groups from 8 different European universities and companies.