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 +1,58 @@
+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.