Codeopt Scotland: optimising software for Scottish industry

The CodeOpt Scotland programme is designed to increase company competitiveness by optimising the performance of business-critical software.

 Launched in March, it is already proving a hit with Scotland’s leading companies.

CodeOpt Scotland is a partnership between Scottish Enterprise (SE), EPCC and Intel. As a collaborative programme, it aims to generate significant benefits for all partners. 

Benefits for companies

For companies, optimised software can potentially reduce costs, increase revenues, improve products and services, or shorten time to market. The key success factor is to select business critical software that is directly related to company success, regardless of whether the code is utilised in the R&D function, in operations, or in sales and marketing. 

Close collaboration within the optimisation project is also an important factor, with the company’s own software experts working hand-in-hand with EPCC and Intel experts. SE, EPCC and Intel contribute to the project funding, and ideally the company provides the in-kind contribution of its in-house experts. 

Optimising processor design

For Intel, investigating how key codes perform on processing platforms can generate significant insights into how to develop new, better performing, processors. 

It is no coincidence that Intel has chosen Scotland as the focus for this intelligence gathering exercise. Intel is optimising platforms to cater for tomorrow’s advanced data analytics and machine learning applications, and Scotland is already home to many of the leading firms in the financial services, energy, oil, and gas sectors, all of whom are generating significant advantages from such technologies. 

Benefits for Scotland and EPCC

An increase in company competitiveness will have a direct effect on the Scottish economy through jobs growth and increased output. Attracting global leaders such as Intel to Scotland will reinforce the strength of the Scottish digital technology sector in which numerous start-ups in the digital, data and novel computation space are already emerging. For EPCC, the opportunity to be at the centre of a resurgent Scottish digital technology sector will further reinforce our position as one of Europe’s most successful high performance computing and advanced data analytics centres.