about/science-it-history: New page with our background

about/index.rst

@@ -65,6 +65,7 @@ Science-IT
    :maxdepth: 2
 
    science-it
+   science-it-history
 
 Science-IT is the organizational manifestation of Aalto Scientific
 Computing.

about/science-it-history.rst

@@ -0,0 +1,89 @@
+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
+<https://extras.csc.fi/mgrid/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
+<https://www.aka.fi/globalassets/1-tutkimusrahoitus/4-ohjelmat-ja-muut-rahoitusmuodot/4-tutkimusinfrastruktuurit/tutkimusinfrastruktuurien_strategia_ja_tiekartta_2014_en.pdf>`__).
+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.
+
+
+See also
+--------
+
+* `University of Helsinki history <https://www.helsinki.fi/en/infrastructures/fcci/fcci-predecessors>`__