Simula Research Laboratory

Historie

Simula Research Laboratory is a Norwegian non-profit research organisation located in Fornebu, Bærum just outside Oslo, the capital of Norway. The laboratory conducts basic research in the fields of networks and distributed systems, scientific computing, and software engineering. Simula was established in 2001, and is headed by Professor Aslak Tveito. Simula has three main objectives; it carries out basic research at a high international level, explores ways to apply the research work carried out at the centre in both industry and the public sector, and educates master students, PhD students and postdoctoral fellows, primarily in cooperation with the University of Oslo (UiO).OwnershipThe laboratory is organised and managed as a private limited company fully owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.NameThe laboratory is named after the programming language Simula, a language developed by the Norwegian scientists Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl. Nygaard and Dahl received the A. M. Turing Award in 2001 and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2002 for their contribution to the development of Object-oriented programming. The reasons why a new research laboratory at its birth took the name of an old programming language were twofold. First, it was intended to honour the outstanding scientific achievement of Dahl and Nygaard. Second, it was to demonstrate the laboratory’s ambition to perform important research that meets high standards of quality.