User:Kjetilmo/Sandbox
The Simula Research Laboratory is a Norwegian research organization, located in Fornebu (just outside of the capital, Oslo, Norway), which conducts basic research in the fields of communication technology, scientific computing and software engineering. It employs 80 people, mainly scientists and engineers, with an annual research budget of 64MNOK (around 8 million Euros). It is named after the Simula programming language, a language developed by Norwegians Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl, the inventors of object-orientation.
Simula’s aim is to carry out research of the highest quality, educate graduate university students and create new businesses. The research focuses on fundamental scientific problems with a large potential for important applications in society. Education is delivered in partnership with the universities in Norway. Simula actively supports and creates the conditions necessary for, the establishment of businesses based on the research it conducts.
The Norwegian Government funds Simula through a contract with The Research Council of Norway. In addition, Simula 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 a Simula 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.
The Simula Research Laboratory offers a unique environment that 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 Networks and Distributed Systems Department
The research area of the Networks and Distributed Systems Department is Quality of Service (QoS) management for future distributed applications and services. The long term goal of the department is to determine the next generation of QoS enabled architectures and platforms for open, dynamically adaptable distributed systems.
Motivation: Future distributed applications have an increasing demand for quality of service. Quality of service (QoS) for distributed applications and services refers to their non-functional properties, including for example the provided response time, bandwidth, privacy, safety, accuracy, and media-quality (for continuous media). QoS management refers to the planned allocation and scheduling of network and end-system resources and software algorithms to meet the QoS needs of applications. QoS is an end-to-end, cross-cutting concern through network layers, end-system (middleware) services, and applications. The department's research experience in networking technologies, middleware, and multimedia systems helps in understanding cross-cutting integration issues and to propose and evaluate relevant QoS support technologies.
The research is grouped into three main complementary activities:
- Component Architecture Support for dynamic management of real-time Quality of Service: The goal of this activity is to investigate how to develop complex real-time applications on a component architecture platform and learn through experimentation how dynamic management and adaptation of real time QoS can be supported in general-purpose component architectures.
We aim to develop a component architecture that preserves the essential benefits of existing component architectures while adding support for platform-managed QoS. The main research method is modeling and prototyping of architectures and services, and experimental evaluation of solutions against recognized solution requirements.
- Switch-, router-, system- and storage area interconnection networks:
Switches and routers are one of the main pillars of modern information and communication technology. Switch- and router architecture is the science on how to design these components so that they achieve the highest possible performance, as well as how to organize a set of such components into cooperating networks. There are several different metrics with which an interconnection network design can be measured. This project focuses on quality of service including fault tolerance, effective routing and topologies.
- Vertical and horizontal interoperation of network quality of service mechanisms: The goal of this activity is to contribute to the realization of end to end Quality of Service support over heterogeneous networks. We explore both the classes of services offered by the different network technologies, and the unification of these into one Quality of Service framework offered by IP. The main research method is empirical testing through discrete event simulation of network behavior.
The Scientific Computing Department
The research in the Scientific Computing department focuses on numerical methods and software for solving partial differential equations. Our aim is to develop efficient, reliable, and maintainable software addressing mathematical models based on partial differential equations.
Motivation: Mathematical models and computer simulations are crucial parts of science and industry. Dramatic performance improvements in computer hardware and numerical algorithms combine with increasingly detailed models for physical phenomena, to form the basis for accurate and predictive simulations. The importance of computer simulations will continue to grow, but realizing the full potential of this development requires dedicated research in a number of areas. There will always be a gap between the problems that can be solved on available computers and the problems that scientists want to address. This can only be narrowed by continuous focus on developing and improving numerical algorithms. Combining advanced numerical techniques with increasingly realistic models also introduce additional challenges, since the increased complexity makes it difficult to develop reliable software. The research focus of the SC department is in the interface between advanced numerical analysis and modern techniques for software development.
Research: A key feature of scientific computing is that it is interdisciplinary; it involves mathematics, computer science, and the relevant application field. The research in the SC department can be grouped into two main categories; generic software tools for solving partial differential equations, and research targeted towards specific applications.
The generic activity is organized in the project Software for PDEs. The aim of this project is to apply modern development techniques to scientific software, enabling the development of efficient and reliable software for simulating complex physical processes. The department’s application oriented researched is mainly geared towards simulations of electrical and mechanical activity in the heart. The Inverse Problems project investigates the ability to use mathematics and computers to locate heart infarctions, while the Cardiac Computations group aims to perform accurate simulations of electro-mechanical activity in the heart. A new large, application oriented activity is launched in 2005; the Computational Geosciences project studies geophysical processes relevant for the petroleum industry.
The Software Engineering Department
The vision of the SE department is to be an international leader in understanding software engineering technologies regarding their impact on human, organizational and technological dimensions of systems development. Acquiring a deep understanding requires proposing and validating theories on the basis of experiments and other empirical studies, primarily conducted in software development organizations. The motivation for the research conducted in the SE department is to support the private and public IT-industries in developing better IT-systems using fewer resources. Hence, technology and knowledge transfer is an important part of the strategy of SE, and is provided through media, teaching, courses in industry and consultancy through Simula Innovation.
The SE department is currently focusing on the following research areas:
- OOAD – Object-Oriented Analysis and Design: The goal of this project is to evaluate and improve the cost-effectiveness of object-oriented analysis and design technologies in an industrial context. Empirical evaluations are required to understand when, how and why proposed technologies might be beneficial. In turn, such a body of knowledge can serve as a basis for improving the proposed technologies.
- Research Methods and Support Tools for Conducting Empirical Research in Software Engineering: The purpose of this project is advance the state-of-the art of empirical software engineering research. As test bed we will use the two other projects in the software engineering department, software effort estimation and object-oriented analysis and design, in particular, through proposing and validating theories on the basis of experiments and other empirical studies, primarily conducted in software development organizations. This is important in order to support the private and public IT-industries in developing better IT-systems using fewer resources, that is, to support software process improvement. The research problem to be addressed is how to develop infrastructures, apparatus and methods for conducting experiments and other empirical studies in software engineering that will significantly advance the state of the art.
- BEST - Better Estimation of Software Tasks: The BEST project focuses on how to improve expert judgment-based software cost estimates and cost uncertainty assessments through better processes, process support and better learning/training processes. Results from the BEST project aims at contributing to better control of software projects and, consequently, more efficient use of IT resources and investments.
Simula Innovation
Simula Innovation AS, a fully owned subsidiary, is the innovation company of Simula Research Laboratory. Simula Innovation transforms research results into commercial value using the Simula Innovation T2M© (Technology to Market) tool. Simula Innovation has a portfolio of seven commercialisation-projects in 2006. In 2005, Simula Innovation established a major research project in collaboration with Hydro ASA to develop new oil exploration technologies and methods based on Simula's expertise in computational geosciences.