Centres of excellence

Academic centres of excellence

Scotland’s universities have a broad span of world-class capabilities, ranging from low-level hardware design, through networking and middleware, to wetware, artificial intelligence, human computer interaction and social informatics.

Software research projects are taking place at the following institutions:

  • University of Edinburgh
    • Edinburgh School of Informatics
  • University of Glasgow
    • Computing Science Glasgow Group
  • University of St Andrews
    • Perception Laboratory's Face Transformer 

Other centres of excellence

A key centre of excellence in the software industry is the Institute for System Level Integration. The institute, which is run by a collective of top Scottish universities, has the aim of bridging the gap between the academic and commercial engineering worlds.

  • The National e-Science Centre (NESC) – With an aim of stimulating and sustaining the development of e-Science in the UK, contributing significantly to its international development and ensuring that its techniques are rapidly propagated to commerce and industry
  • Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) – A European centre of expertise in advanced research, technology transfer, and the provision of supercomputers to universities. Exceptional computer range and around 70 staff committed to the solution of real-world problems
  • HECToR – The High End Computing Centre is the UK’s front-line national supercomputing service – HECToR is the fastest computer in the UK, capable of 570 million million calculations a second. HECToR can perform computations at a staggering rate of 63 million operations per second – in 2007 it was named the 17th fastest computer in the world
  • Scotgrid – Aimed at anticipating and influencing next-generation grid service capacity establishment and community building through the study of grid use evolution and examining how grid communities develop
  • Northern Research Partnership  - A partnership of key researchers from three of Scotland’s top universities, focusing on mobile, distributed and network systems, human computer interaction and intelligent systems