The Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science is an internationally recognised centre of excellence in computer science. It is one of the research institutes of the School of Informatics of The University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh was the only University in the UK awarded the top 5*A rating in Computer Science in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise. With 87.1 research active staff submitted for assessment, it is the UK's biggest research group in this area. The University of Edinburgh is a partner in the National e-Science Centre in Scotland, and has acquired substantial expertise in e-Science technology because of the pioneering high-performance scientific computing work of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre.