History of Science-IT
Our history explains how we are now, so here’s a summary for those who are interested.
2005: M-grid
M-grid (name from “materials”, as in physics stuff) was funded as a Finnish Research Infrastructure (FIRI) project by the Academic of Finland. It provided funding for local university department HPC clusters and a collaboration to develop the configuration to run them. The Helsinki University of Technology (predecessor to Aalto University) cluster was named kvartsi (“qwartz”). They were run together as a grid, where jobs submitted to one cluster can also run on others. This was the start of one of the parts of the Triton cluster. Check out these old docs
2010: Finnish Grid Infrastructure and department collaboration
Eventually, M-grid grew within Aalto and became a collaboration between several departments, mainly Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, Information and Computer Science, and Applied Physics. Around the same time, the next FIRI project became the “Finnish Grid Infrastructure”. There was the joint Triton resource, used by members of all departments. This is when the name Science-IT emerged. Management was members of the IT groups of the departments. Along with this was the merger of various computing clusters to form the Aalto Triton cluster.
In 201x, Triton hardware had grown enough that it moved to a machine room run by CSC nearby. This provided more reliability, and further professionalization of all of the management.
During this time, Science-IT was still funded by FIRI, in the projects “Finnish Grid Infrastructure” (FGI) and later the “Finnish Grid and Cloud Infrastructure” (FGCI, starting in 2014, ref). It provided continued growth, regular new hardware, and most importantly a collaboration with other universities and CSC.
Training was a part of Science-IT/FGI/FGCI from the beginning. Courses began in earnest around 2015ish. We began yearly “HPC Kickstart” courses as well as a wide variety of other courses on specialty topics. Most were run by Aalto but all other university affiliates in Finland were invited to attend.
2017ish: expanding the scope
Around 2017, there was a push towards expanded usability of the HPC resources: now longer were they mainly focused on computational experts, but were for a wider and wider audience. This basically meant thinking about usability some, expanding our documentation to make it clear we wanted to support others, and so on. This led to a medium-term problem, where we found more people were trying to use the cluster, but weren’t fully prepared to do so.
2020s: Scientific computing support, not HPC support
Our solution was to, in 2020, start the Research Software Engineer team. These were dedicated people hired not as cluster admins, but to help others with their work, however it may be. This explicitly included those who didn’t come from computational fields and those who haven’t studied computing for all their careers. This turned out to be a winning idea, and we slowly but constantly have been growing with more users from all around Aalto. Our mission is no longer to only support the Triton cluster, but to support computing in general: Triton locally, CSC computers, or even smaller scale data and software support.
Around this time, the FGCI collaboration turned into the “Finnish Computing Competence Infrastructure” to emphasize that its role is not just hardware, but promoting the broader competence in computing at the university level.