diff --git a/about/index.rst b/about/index.rst index b23a3ee8c..c7f5e7729 100644 --- a/about/index.rst +++ b/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. diff --git a/about/science-it-history.rst b/about/science-it-history.rst new file mode 100644 index 000000000..418e00cce --- /dev/null +++ b/about/science-it-history.rst @@ -0,0 +1,58 @@ +History of Science-IT +===================== + +Our history explains how we are now, so here's a summary for those who +are interested. + +2009: M-grid +------------ + +M-grid was funded as a Finnish Research Infrastructure (FIRI) project +by the Academic of Finland. It provided funding for local university +HPC clusters and a collaboration to develop the configuration to run +them. They were run together as a grid, where jobs submitted to one +cluster can also run on others. This was the start of the **Triton +cluster**. + +20xx: department collaboration +------------------------------ + +Eventually, M-grid grew and became a collaboration between several +departments, mainly Biomedical Engineering and Computational Science, +Information and Computer Science, and Applied Physics. 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. + +In 20xx, 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 "Finnish Grid and Cloud +Infrastructure" (FGCI). 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. + +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. This turned +out to be a winning idea, and we slowly.