In the 1980s and 1990s research into parallel computing systems became an important part of the work of the Computer Science Department. Collaboration with the Physics Department led to the creation of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre. In the early 1970s computing technology had advanced to the point where it became feasible to construct multi-processor computer systems, so various research groups, particularly in the USA, started to explore this new design space. In the 1980s, interest in multi-processor systems arose at Edinburgh in both the Computer Science Department and the Physics Department. The interests of the physicists was driven by their need for increased computing power, particularly for work in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). Collaboration between the two departments and the University's Computing Service led to the creation in 1990 of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC). EPCC went on to become the UK's leading academic high-performance computing centre. Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre In the Computer Science Department Murray Cole's PhD research led to a long-term interest in parallel programming models, emphasising approaches which exploit generic patterns of parallelsim in the form of algorithmic skeletons to package and optimize well known patterns of computation and interaction as parallel programming abstractions.In 1988 Rosemary Candlin and Rob Pooley initiated the POSIE project. Its aim was to provide a focus for systems research in the area of operating systems for distributed memory parallel computers. As the project developed, it took in not only hardware and software construction but also simulaton, formal methods and performance evaluation methodology. Although the project did not lead to the creation of a commercially viable operating system, there were a number of concrete outcomes. The construction of a hardware testbed, for example, allowed performance measurements to be made to a level of accuracy that would have been impossible on existing commercial machines. The formal specification of the operating system for the testbed provided a means of guiding performance experiements and was a new and original development in the software engineering of distributed systems. A comprehensive description and evalation of the project can be found in Rosemary Candlin's 1995 Computer Systems Group Technical Report: The POSIE Project: Studies to Support the Design of Operating Systems for Multicomputers The HASE Project section of this website includes descriptions of a number of other projects that involved studies of parallel systems. This article was published on 2025-08-12
