National e-Science Centre - MSc in Distributed Scientific Computing, University of Edinburgh

The National e-Science Centre

The application of distributed computing techniques in science is often called "e-Science" and the University of Edinburgh (in partnership with Glasgow University) hosts the UK's National e-Science Centre (NeSC). NeSC provides a focus for the UK e-Science community as a whole, both through the event programme of the e-Science Institute and involvement in leading e-infrastructure development projects, such as the Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII-UK) and the European Enabling Grids for E-SciencE (EGEE) project. The staff teaching on the MSc have leading roles in projects developing or applying e-Science technologies and can enliven course materials with examples drawn from their own work.

Distributed computing is closely allied with parallel computing and the University of Edinburgh hosts the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), which is a sister institute to NeSC in the School of Physicsa and Astronomy, and which hosts some of Europe's most powerful computing resources (see facilities). MSc students are able to take as options courses from the MSc in High Performance Computing run by EPCC, enabling them to gain experience of the full range of distributed and parallel computing techniques.