Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre
Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre

Overview

Lero, the Irish Software Research Centre, is a dispersed centre of excellence in software engineering and related topics. Founded in 2005, it brings together software research teams from the Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) and 9 Irish academic institutions: Dublin City University, Dundalk Institute of Technology, Maynooth University, National University of Ireland, Galway, Tralee Institute of Technology, Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork, University College Dublin and its headquarters at University of Limerick.

Lero’s research programme focuses on evolving critical systems (ECS). These systems change over time (“evolving”), are strategically important to their users or owners (“critical”), and are often software intensive (“systems”). ECS increasingly characterises a sizeable proportion of software systems in development and use today, from business-critical systems (such as airline websites), to safety-critical systems (such as an automotive braking control system), to product… Through ICHEC, Lero has access to the Fionn supercomputer, a SGI ICE-X hybrid cluster providing part of the ICHEC national service. Fionn quadruples the computing resources previously available to scientists in Ireland, also provides access to the latest technology from Intel, Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi coprocessors, and NVIDIA, Tesla accelerators, to researchers across Ireland.

A wide range of new research and development (R&D) will be enabled on Fionn. These potentially include an increased resolution in weather and climate forecasting, larger and longer simulations for research in areas such as medical device development, nanotechnology, genomics, drug design, etc. The machine will also be capable of running heterogeneous workflows that require large compute power and large amounts of memory either during the pre- or post-processing phases of researchers work.
. One of Lero’s strategic goals is to work with industry partners to identify and solve industry problems, generating new SW-based products & services thus ensuring that Lero’s research is firmly connected to the real world. Without the involvement of our industry partners, we wouldn’t have the same insights into the evolving challenges of the software engineering community or the opportunity to test our ideas in live business and industry environments.

We currently work with approximately 40 companies in a wide range of projects funded by Irish funding agencies (SFI, Enterprise Ireland, the Irish Research Council), by European agencies (Horizon 2020, the European Space Agency) and directly by industry partners themselves.

There are many ways in which companies work with Lero, supported by a wide range of Irish and international funding programmes. Whether we are dealing with a major research challenge being addressed by an international team of collaborators or a smaller challenge being faced by a…. Yes. service.