The School of Engineering Sciences of the University of Southampton is one of the UK’s premier research led engineering departments. It holds the highest rank in the UK Government’s grading of university research and, with nearly 100 faculty staff, is also amongst the largest UK University Schools working in the general area of mechanical and aerospace sciences. It is organised into eight research groups of which the Computational Engineering and Design Group is the second largest. The combined income of the School is around £25m per year; it houses some 600 undergraduate and 150 postgraduate students and has research contracts with an enormously wide and varied group of companies and government organisations around the world.

The CEDG will contribute will bring the following expertise in the project:
Design Search and Optimisation – The CEDG is the UK’s leading academic group working in the field of design search and optimisation, particularly in aerospace engineering. Following a competition across the UK university sector it was awarded the University Technology Partnership (UTP) for Design, Search and Optimisation, funded by BAE SYSTEMS and Rolls-Royce. Work in this area has been supported by organizations as diverse as the DSTL, QinetiQ, DERA, Cable and Wireless, Glaxo Wellcome, BAE SYSTEMS, Rolls-Royce, the European Union and the EPSRC.
Grid – The CEDG houses the University of Southampton’s Regional e-Science Centre, which is part of the UK National e-Science initiative and is the focus for e-Science and grid based activities at Southampton. It hosts a number of the new grid based research and applications activities now underway at Southampton and has access to large-scale computational and data handling facilities.
Computing – The Group therefore has access to a range of advanced computational facilities that underlie its ongoing research to provide grid-based seamless access to state-of-the-art optimisation and search tools, intelligent knowledge repositories, industrial strength analysis codes, and distributed computing & data resources. This includes a number of parallel and cluster based facilities, including the University's large 500 processor Intel cluster. The chair of the Group is also the lead academic concerned with the procurement and operation of the University’s next generation large parallel compute cluster, which is scheduled for installation in Spring 2004.

The CEDG will bring this expertise to bear in the aerospace work packages of SIMDAT. In particular the Group will contribute to the creation of the services that the aerospace demonstrator will be built from. This will include work on design ontology definition, the definition of prototype work flows, including those that make use of advanced optimization methods and parametric CAD systems. It will also play an important role in providing the computational infrastructure needed to integrate and operate a number of the CAD, physics and PSE based services needed in the demonstrator.

University of Southampton - CED website