Prior to his appointment at Edinburgh he was a Reader in Computer Science at the University of Manchester where he was a major contributer to the MU5 project.
He is a past Vice-President of EQANIE, the European Quality Assurance Network for Informatics Education, and was the first chair (2010 - 2017) of the EQANIE Accreditation Committee.
Following retirement, he is no longer active in research (so no longer supervising students or visitors) but still maintain an interest in HASE, a Hierarchical computer Architecture design and Simulation Environment we developed at Edinburgh. This environment is effectively a virtual laboratory for research in computer architecture. It has been used for a number of major projects:
- ALAMO: Algorithms, Architectures and Models of Computation
- EMIN: Evaluation of Multiprocessor Interconnection Networks
- UKQCD Computer Simulation Project
- Simulation Modelling of Distributed Shared Memory Clusters
- Storlite: Storage Systems Optical Networking
HASE has also been used as the development environment for a number of undergraduate and postgraduate projects. It can be run on Linux, MACs and Windows and can be downloaded from the HASE website. The source code for a number of models that can be used to support the teaching of computer architecture is also available from the Computer Architecture Simulation Models website. There are also models of a number of historically significant computers: the Ferranti Atlas Computer, built for the December 2012 50th Anniversary of the Atlas Computer celebration at The University of Manchester, its successor at Manchester, the MU5 computer, and models of the CDC 6600 and the Cray-1. Each of these models is designed to provide a visual demonstration of the principles of operation of the processor concerned, rather than being a full implementation of its instruction set.