 The laboratory is organised and managed as a private limited company fully owned by the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research.The laboratory is named after the programming language Simula, a language developed by the Norwegian scientists Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl.Nygaard and Dahl received the A. M. Turing Award in 2001 and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2002 for their contribution to the development of Object-oriented programming.