Simula Research Laboratory
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Simula Research Laboratory (SRL) is a Norwegian research organization, located at Fornebu (just outside of the capital, Oslo), which conducts basic research in networks and distributed systems, scientific computing and software engineering. It employs more than a 100 people, mainly scientists and engineers, with an annual research budget of NOK 64 million. The Managing Director is Professor Aslak Tveito. SRL conducts basic research in the fields of networks and distributed systems, scientific computing and software engineering, and promotes the applications of the research to both industry and the public sector. SRL educates Master of Science and Philosophiae Doctor-students in collaboration with the Universities in Norway.
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Owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research (80%), SINTEF and the Norwegian Computing Center, the Norwegian Government funds SRL through a contract with The Research Council of Norway. In addition, SRL seeks cooperation with industry in order to provide solutions, increase the relevance of the research, and in order to strengthen the funding of basic research. It is an SRL policy to avoid short-term projects. Consulting and technologically oriented projects should preferably be organized as stand alone companies or conducted in cooperation with other partners.
SRL emphasizes and promotes basic research while still covering the broader landscape from postgraduate teaching to commercialization. The organizational and funding framework allows basic research to take centre stage, without any domination by constraints from pursuit of external funding typically found in industrial research institutes, or from the heavier teaching commitments found in the Universities.
The laboratory is named after the Simula programming language, a language developed by Norwegians Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl. Nygaard and Dahl received the Turing award in 2001 and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2002 for their contribution to the development of Object-oriented programming.
SRL has three research departments: Networks and Distributed Systems, Scientific Computing and Software Engineering, and three subsidiaries, Simula Innovation, Kalkulo and Simula School of Research and Innovation.
In December 2006, a project at the Scientific Computing department was designated as a Norwegian Centre of Excellence (CoE). It is led by Professor Hans Petter Langtangen and named "Centre for Software components for biomedical flows". The Research Council of Norway has initiated a Centres of Excellence (CoE) scheme, with the intention to bring more Norwegian researchers and research groups up to a high international standard. The centres are devoted to long-term, basic research. At present, there are 21 Norwegian Centres of Excellence.
