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The spin-out company CSM Ltd. was set up in 1991 to commercially develop Durham research on program transformation. Up until 1999, this company (which in the mid-90's became Durham Software Engineering Ltd. and subsequently Software Migrations Ltd.) and researchers at Durham University developed the FermaT Workbench: an industrial-strength assembler re-engineering workbench for program comprehension, migration and re-engineering. In 1999, Software Migrations Ltd. relocated to St. Albans and now has an extensive list of national and international clients. All its products (software and services) are built on the FermaT Workbench and has generated considerable revenue with this revenue strongly expected to rise steeply in the near future.
Impact: The underpinning research resulted in an innovative Worst-Case Execution time (WCET) analysis technology now called RapiTime, which was transferred to industry via a spin-out company, Rapita Systems Ltd. The technology enables companies in the aerospace and automotive industries to reduce the time and cost required to obtain confidence in the timing correctness of the systems they develop. The RapiTime technology has global reach having been deployed on major aerospace and automotive projects in the UK, Europe, Brazil, India, China, and the USA. Key customers include leading aerospace companies such as: [text removed for publication]; as well as major automotive suppliers: [text removed for publication]. Since 2008, Rapita has won export orders to China worth over [text removed for publication]. From 2008/9 to 2011/12, the company's annual revenues have more than doubled from [text removed for publication] to over [text removed for publication]. As of August 2013, Rapita employs [text removed for publication] people at its offices in York and Cambridge.
From 1995 Professor Munjiza's research at QMUL has led to the development of a series of algorithms which can predict the movement and relationship between objects. These algorithms have been commercialised by a range of international engineering and software companies including Orica, the world's leading blasting systems provider (via their MBM software package), and the software modelling company, Dassault Systems (via their Abaqus software). Through these commercialisation routes Munjiza's work has generated significant economic impact which is global in nature. For example, his predictive algorithms have enabled safer, more productive blast mining for Orica's clients — in one mine alone, software based on Munjiza's modelling approach has meant a 10% increase in productivity, a 7% reduction in costs and an annual saving of $2.8 million. It has also been used in Dassault Systems' Abaqus modelling software, which is the world's leading generic simulation software used to solve a wide variety of industrial problems across the defence, automobile, construction, aerospace and chemicals sectors with associated economic impact.
Research into the operational characteristics and applicability of biological reaction networks, carried out at the university in collaboration with groups at Caltech and Sony Systems, revealed the pressing need for a standard format that could be used for storage and exchange of mathematical models of such systems. Hertfordshire researchers played a crucial role in the initial design, dissemination and early exploitation of the Systems Biology Markup Language, SBML, now recognised as the de facto standard format for this purpose. Several major scientific publishers operating across academic boundaries require their authors to use SBML, and 254 software tools, including MATLAB and Mathematica, are now SBML-compliant. Online forums testify to a sizeable, international user-developer community that encompasses engineers, biologists, mathematicians and software developers.
Rolls-Royce uses the HYDRA computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code for the design of all of its new gas turbine engines. The HYDRA CFD package, including the mathematical theory behind it, was developed by Professor Mike Giles and his research team in the period 1998-2004 at the University of Oxford, and subsequently transferred to Rolls-Royce, forming the basis of the RR corporate CFD strategy with an investment of over 100 person years in development.
Since 2009, HYDRA has become the standard aerodynamic design tool across Rolls-Royce, and has been used to design Rolls-Royce's Trent 1000 engine and the newer Trent XWB. HYDRA has enabled Rolls-Royce to save over [text removed for publication] in test rig expenses, provides superior accuracy compared to its competitors such as FLUENT, and has contributed to increases in engine efficiency of up to [text removed for publication], which in turn has led to higher sales and increased revenue for Rolls-Royce.
Embedded software in the transportation sector (railway, automotive and avionics) needs to meet high reliability requirements because errors may have severe consequences. Research since 2008 in the UoA has developed effective reasoning technology to provide assurance that key error types are eliminated from embedded software, and has created novel algorithms to prove its integrity. Major players such as [text removed for publication] GM and Airbus have used technology developed in the UoA to verify the absence of errors. A particular advantage of this technology is its ability to reason about floating-point arithmetic, meaning that a much wider class of properties can be verified. The technology is widely distributed via third party operating systems and tool-sets.
A spin-out company, Contemplate Ltd, is using advanced static analysis technology in global top-ten investment banks and other clients to discover previously undetected defects in enterprise-scale business-critical multi-threaded Java codebases. The impact is in terms of the benefits delivered to Contemplate's clients by this technology and in terms of the formation and growth of Contemplate as an employer and a successful business.
In the 1990s Dr D Moore, who has extensive experience in fluid dynamics, worked with collaborators at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) on parallelising an ocean modelling code. This resulted in the Navy Layered Ocean Model (NLOM) and later the Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM). NLOM and HYCOM, which were/are distributed through the NRL and HYCOM consortium, are open access ocean modelling codes that are used to forecast ocean currents. They have proved particularly impactful for the forecasting of ocean oil spills and the corresponding management of the environmental risk. NLOM and/or HYCOM have been used extensively in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 as well as the Montara Well Release oil spill in Australia in 2009, providing valuable forecasts to assist with the response to the disasters.
Semmle is a successful spin-out company set up by members of the UoA, based on their research on program analysis. Semmle markets an industrial-strength product allowing organisations with large software systems to understand and manage their code bases. This business intelligence platform started to be sold to prominent customers in 2008, including [text removed for publication] NASA. NASA used it to help ensure the safe landing of the Curiosity Mars Rover.
Many of the top supercomputers use Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate scientific computing applications with less energy consumption and lower overall cost. GPUs achieve this by having comparatively large numbers of simple processing elements when compared against CPUs, which have fewer, more sophisticated, elements. However, to take full advantage of GPUs requires quite different algorithms and implementation techniques for mathematical software libraries. Researchers at the University of Oxford have developed a number of such algorithms and implementation techniques over the period 2008-2013, which have been incorporated into software libraries distributed by NAG, NVIDIA and the Apache Foundation and have enhanced the performance up to 150x compared with single thread CPU calculations and 20x relative to multithreaded CPU calculations. These libraries are used by large numbers of application developers worldwide.