Annual Report 2013

Transcription

Annual Report 2013

CSC Annual Report
Pääkirjoitus
Table
of contents
CSC ANNUAL REPORT 2013
Managing director's review............................................................................7
Expertise from Knowledge
KEY PROJECTS IN 2013..........................................................................................................9
Steps on the road to open information .................................................9
RAKETTI ...........................................................................................................................................9
The Kajaani Datacenter and new
supercomputer resources are up and running......................... 11
COOPERATION............................................................................................................................. 13
Training Services............................................................................................................... 13
National and international cooperation.............................................. 15
CSC’s values
Quality through cooperation
Passionate for expertise
Responsibility and openness
People are key
Core activities ..................................................................................................................... 21
Funet, the Finnish Research and
Education Network ....................................................................................................... 21
National data infrastructure services
for science and culture ............................................................................................27
Scientific computing services for higher
education institutions...............................................................................................29
ORGANIZATION........................................................................................................................... 31
Personnel.................................................................................................................................... 31
Corporate governance.............................................................................................. 31
Management Group and Board of Directors –
Personal information with responsibilities and
outside interests...............................................................................................................34
CSC's organization 31.12.2013........................................................................38
Responsibility Report
Responsibility report 2013 is published in Finnish:
www.csc.fi/vastuullisuus/csc-yritysvastuuraportti-2013.pdf
C S C A N N U A L R E P O R T 2 013
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Pääkirjoitus
Managing
director's review
“CSC supports the competitiveness
of Finnish research by providing
high-quality and reliable services
that are both cost- and eco-efficient.”
© Eeva Vierros
Respecting clients, partners and
employees enhances cooperation
CSC’s themes for 2013 were values and appreciation. Our values emphasise cooperation, responsibility, openness, expertise and our people. With appreciation we mean honest and appreciative dialog with
our clients, partners and personnel, which hopefully leads to even
better collaboration and networking. Appreciation also means that
CSC keeps its promises.
2013 was a successful year for CSC. Our new supercomputers went
into operation and were soon running at high usability and utilisation
rates. The energy-efficiency of the datacenter built in Kajaani exceeded our expectations – it is not only one of the most eco-efficient datacenters in the world, but also among the most cost-efficient. Finnish
computational science now has world-class supercomputer resources
at its disposal. In addition, Finland was very successful in international
applications for resources. Thanks to this, we also efficiently gained
access to state-of-the-art European systems for research purposes.
The quality and cost-efficiency of scientific computing services
were evaluated by means such as surveys of the Computational Science Forum and university management. The results were good, indicating that CSC’s scientific computing services were both of high
quality and cost-efficient. We stepped up our cost-efficiency by targeting externally-funded projects (EU, Tekes, Academy of Finland) at key
areas of Finnish research.
The Funet network and its services operated reliably all year and
the traffic volumes grew. For instance, use of the eduroam roaming
service for wireless LAN access on campuses grew manyfold. Network
usability was top-notch: 99.99 percent. The traffic volume rose by
more than 30 percent, additional connections were built and new network services went into operation.
Growth in data infrastructure remained strong. The National Digital
Library project of the Ministry of Education and Culture was completed and the National Research Data initiative entered the final stretch.
The long term preservation service of the National Digital Library
started in December 2013. By the order of the Ministry of Education
and Culture CSC also prepared the inter-administrative Open Science
and Research (Avoin tiede ja tutkimus) initiative.
RAKETTI initiative coordinated by CSC ended in March 2014 and
some of its results became services provided by CSC.
Spearhead projects in international data infrastructure – EUDAT
(European Data Infrastructure) and RDA (Research Data Alliance) –
made headway and increased the international impact of our operations. All in all, CSC’s services were reliable in the year now ended and
the objectives were achieved. CSC produced a state-of-the-art IT operating environment for its clients and maintained the international
competitiveness of Finnish research.
The tighter economy and growing importance of cost-efficiency
were felt in all operations. In spite of this, 2013 was one of CSC’s best
years from a financial standpoint. The Finnish centralised model of
providing IT services once again proved its effectiveness in terms of
both quality and costs. We produced the services ordered from us
as agreed, and not only saved on costs, but in some cases surpassed
the objectives. CSC also managed to acquire a substantial amount of
external project funding. According to a study by Tekes, we were the
most successful large Finnish corporation in acquiring project funding
from the EU’s 7th framework programme.
In 2013, CSC was involved in more than 20 international (EU) projects, playing a key role in many of them. This enabled us to secure
substantial additional resources and services – such as high-performance computing, application development and data management
– for use in Finnish research. We also developed our services in cooperation with our European partners, partly with European funding.
CSC’s international operations aim to ensure that our researchers can
work in a globally competitive IT environment. We succeeded quite
well in this effort during the year now ended.
The great team spirit, motivation and well-being of our employees
have helped us to succeed – and we want to take good care of them
in the future, too. 2013 was one of the most successful years in CSC’s
history. When our results were evaluated, the cost-efficiency and quality of operations were rated as excellent. CSC has often been able to
enjoy such sterling results in recent years. Only skilled and motivated
employees can make this happen. We are very grateful not only to
our clients and partners, but also to our employees and stakeholders,
particularly the Ministry of Education and Culture, which makes our
operations possible.
We are in a good position going forward.
Kimmo Koski
Managing Director
CSC – IT Center for Science
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KEY Pääkirjoitus
PROJECTS IN 2013
In an open research environment, research
results, publications, background materials,
methods and models must be freely available
to the scientific community.
KEY PROJECTS IN 2013
STEPS ON THE ROAD TO OPEN INFORMATION
Reetta Kettunen, Secretary General, Committee for Public information
in Finland. As an advisory body, the Committee promotes the
publication of information.
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C S C VA UN ON SU IAKLE R TE OP MO U
R ST 2 0 1 32
Digitalising and opening research processes create new opportunities
for collaboration and interaction among researchers and stakeholders. The aim is, that research results and new information can be independently and transparently verified and re-used by other scientists.
This will have a positive impact on science and the society at large.
Numerous research organizations and funders, both in the national
and European level, are issuing recommendations and policies for
promoting open access to research results. Many countries and international stakeholders have realised the value of research data and
the benefits of sharing it, and have started taking steps to promote
the openness of research data. Open access to research data enables
greater effectiveness in responding to global challenges.
The National Research Data Initiative (TTA) and National Digital
Library (KDK) projects of the Ministry of Education and Culture, promote not only the openness of knowledge and structures, but also
their sustainability. Digitalisation has increased the amount of data.
This poses one of the greatest challenges to open access: how can we
cost-effectively ensure the sustainability, value and usability of digital
information? All organizations struggle with the management of data
life cycles and their required sustainability: funding tends to be only
provided for a short period of time; the solutions are often expertdependent, which means that when the responsible expert moves to
another position, the solution is lost; documentation and metadata
might not be sufficient; and, at some point, interfaces, software and
file formats become obsolete.
In an open research environment, research results, publications,
background materials, methods and models must be openly and freely available to the scientific community. To ensure they can be found
and re-used, there has to be services that provide open access to
metadata of data, publications and methods. The Open Access policy
drafted in the TTA project in 2013 describe the target for availability
and how it could be achieved. The guidelines take positions on issues
such as publication. The basic aim is to ensure open access to research
results on information networks through open interfaces. In order to
facilitate availability, a culture which values personal authorship, merit
and ownership, is needed. Even now, it is very difficult for many individuals to share their data openly due to unclear copyright issues.
However, these issues might be more clear-cut than one might think:
for instance, no copyright is granted for measurement and simulation
data.
Sustainability is required in the life cycles of digital objects (publications, data, computer models, images, etc.). Reliable long term
preservation is particularly vital for unique materials (weather observations, historical documents and the like), because they cannot be
recreated.
Information and research results are inherently valuable, both in
themselves and in combination with other data. The availability of research data and results will enable the creation of new combinations
and connections. The benefits of the preservation of research results
and methods arise from their use, not only for research, political decision-making and the needs of citizen science, but also for innovations and services. The steps taken in 2013 represent the beginning of
a long journey on this road.
RAKETTI
RAKETTI (Information Management to Support the Structural Development in Higher Education Institutions (HEI)) was a six-year joint project
between HEI and the Ministry of Education and Culture. Its long-term
goal was to develop the interoperability and common metrics, comprehensive, reliable and automatically collectable data of research and
studies for use in the management and steering of HEI.
The project comprised four subprojects:
•• The KOKOA subproject focused on support, guides and training
for enterprise architecture at HEI.
•• The OPI subproject supported interoperability and common metrics, as well as their promotion through student administration.
•• The TUTKI supported interoperability and common metrics, as
well as their promotion through research administration.
•• The VIRTA project built a national information resource for HEI
CSC coordinated the project over its entire life cycle. The project ended in March 2014. The work carried out in the project, its
numerous expert bodies and working and steering groups led to
the creation of many permanent cooperation groups, new system
applications, publication portals, reports, studies, standardised
practices and new services, some of which will in future be provided by CSC on a shared and centralised basis. The project has
involved hundreds of representatives of many fields of higher education. For more on the results of the project, see page 21 of the
Annual Report.
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KEY Pääkirjoitus
PROJECTS IN 2013
The Kajaani Datacenter and new
supercomputer resources are up and running
2013 was also a work-filled and highly effective year for CSC’s
datacenter operations. The successful completion of the transfer of
computation services to the Kajaani datacenter, the decommissioning
of old computing servers and the modernisation of the Espoo datacenters kept experts busy. At the same time, the service underwent
an end-to-end information security audit required for certification.
Datacenter CSC Kajaani was granted ISO/IEC27001:2005 certification
in June 2013. Work towards the certification of the Espoo datacenters
is ongoing.
Datacenter CSC Kajaani performed extremely well during its first
year in operation: its systems boasted exceptionally good usability
and world-class energy-efficiency. Thanks to efforts to provide sustainable ICT services, all of CSC’s datacenters either maintained or improved their efficiency as a result of energy audits and fine-tuning of
cooling processes.
In 2013, CSC’s total energy consumption amounted to 12.7 MWh
(+9.9 percent on 2012), of which Kajaani accounted for 31 percent,
running at the highest efficiency achieved to date. As energy-intensive
services are transferred to Kajaani, CSC’s overall energy-efficiency can
be expected to improve substantially, even though the service range
is growing steadily.
© Kristian Niininen
The new supercomputers deployed in 2013 – Sisu (Cray XC30) and
Taito (HP cluster) – tripled CSC’s computing capacity. Sisu is one of the
world’s first Cray XC30 systems in production. CSC’s old Cray XT4/XT5
was decommissioned at the end of May. In addition to providing a substantial boost in computing power (x 3.4), the new systems are over
three times more energy-efficient than their predecessors.
Both systems have been exceptionally stable, with usability of 99.5
percent throughout the year. User feedback on their performance has
been positive. The new systems are also much more uniform, sharing the same rapid storage system, which makes it easier for users to
switch between Sisu and Taito.
In addition to use in ordinary computing, the Taito computing and
storage systems are used in the provision of the Pouta cloud computing service. Pouta is intended to provide flexibility to clients and facilitate the performance of their increasingly complex job queues on
CSC’s computing servers. Pouta will go into operation in early 2014.
In 2013, CSC also acquired prototypes of the T-Platforms and
Bull supercomputers, which were partially financed by PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe). These systems feature
cutting-edge accelerator technology (by NVIDIA and Intel) and provide
unbeatable energy- and cost-efficiency compared with ordinary processors. The systems are in pilot use with a view to assessing the role
of accelerator technologies in future high-performance computing
procurements.
In 2014, Sisu and Taito will be expanded and updated with Intel’s
latest processors and the installation of Bull will be completed. Together, these updates increase computing capacity fivefold. The earlier systems (Hippu, Vuori) will be decommissioned and cluster computing will be centralised in Taito. This will reduce operational costs
and both simplify and streamline the range of computation services.
The Vlasiator space weather modelling project of the Finnish Meteorological Institute was granted a record
amount of international PRACE resources. Head of Group Sebastian von Alfthan of the Finnish Meteorological
Institute participates in the Vlasiator project group led by Minna Palmroth, Programme Head.
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CSC’s new supercomputer Sisu (Cray XC30) was inaugurated 25.4.2013.
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Pääkirjoitus
COOPERATION
© Sami Ilvonen
COOPERATION
Training Services
Close cooperation with stakeholders helps up
to develop our services to meet the real needs of
our clients. Our goal is to provide Finnish science,
education and culture with access to the best
possible resources.
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C S C V U O S I K E R T O M U S 2 013
CSC’s training services generate added value for Finnish science
and society, offering high-quality science and technology courses,
workshops and other activities. CSC promotes the sharing of expertise to keep its clients at the forefront of scientific IT development.
CSC offers training first and foremost to the users of its services, researchers from sectoral research institutes, foreign researchers and
IT professionals from Finland and abroad. Training activities seek to
familiarise clients with CSC’s infrastructure and how to utilize it effectively, contribute to wide awareness of IT news, trends and future
outlooks among clients, and facilitate the horizontal networking of
clients both in Finland and internationally. CSC’s courses and other
training events provide direct, substantial benefits to daily research
work.
In 2013, CSC held close to 100 different courses or events, for
over 150 training days in total. More than 2,300 participants benefited from the training and, as in previous years, they rated the quality
of the training as extremely good.
The seminar series started in 2012 on the new computing resources at Datacenter CSC Kajaani (Sisu and Taito supercomputers)
was continued also in 2013. The seminars aimed to provide the users
with as much information as possible on these new resources and
to provide guidance on how to start using them. CSC also organized
workshops in universities on the National Research Data Initiative
(TTA) of the Ministry of Education and Culture. The aim of these
workshops was to collect detailed information on researchers’ data
needs.
It is generally evident that there is a growing need for training
on data-intensive research methods and techniques. The substantial
rise in the amount of resources used in scientific computation has
also ushered in the need for training on suitable new computation
methods as well as increased interest in the latest computation technologies. To address this, CSC has expanded its training offerings
to better cover topics such as next-generation sequencing (NGS) as
well as the preservation, analysis and visualisation of large data volumes. CSC once again successfully organized its own annual seasonal schools – the Summer School in Scientific and High-Performance
Computing and the Spring School in Computational Chemistry. In
2013, a further two seasonal schools were added in the form of a
Winter School in Bioinformatics and an Autumn School in Computational Physics.
One of the ongoing trends in training services is to engage in
closer client cooperation in the planning and implementation of
training. Examples of this collaboration include a course organized
together with the Langnet doctoral programme in language studies,
a workshop on infrastructure architectures organized with TERENA
(the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association) and a seminar on enterprise architectures arranged with the
Ministry of Education and Culture. In addition, CSC actively organize
training events at universities instead of CSC’s own facilities. In several courses the possibility for remote participation online was also
offered.
PRACE Advanced Training Centre at CSC
PRACE research infrastructure and its PRACE Advanced Training Centres (PATCs) have consolidated their position in 2013 as a major provider of training on scientific computation, both in Europe and on the
international scale. The PATC hosted by CSC started its operations in
2012, and is currently expected to continue at least until the end of
the 2014–2015 academic year. Its courses, workshops and seminars
deal with cutting-edge technologies and methods in high-performance computing. In 2013, the PATC portfolio was expanded even further in line with the PRACE strategy, with a greater focus on providing
training that meets the needs of industry in particular.
In 2013, 12 training events were organize, one in cooperation with
KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. More than 200 people
took part in these events. About 80 percent of them represented Finnish universities or other institutions. Hosting a PATC has a significant
influence on fostering Finnish expertise in computation science. Its
training events, which attract a great deal of international interest,
promote the international networking of Finnish researchers.
200
180
Count
189
2310 participants on 2013
150
160
137
140
120
108
100
80
151
134
130
80
74
87
90
71
60
40
20
0
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
No. of courses and events Course days
2013
Courses and events 2008–2013.
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Pääkirjoitus
COOPERATION
CSC’s international operations aim
to ensure that our researchers can
work in a globally competitive
IT environment. In our international operations, we are preparing
for research projects related to the
European Union’s Horizon 2020
programme for 2014–2020.
National and international cooperation
CSC and higher education institutions
team up on datacenter project
Finnish higher education institutions have systematically cooperated
in ICT services for many years. Examples include the technology architecture development projects launched by the CIO Network of Universities of Applied Sciences (AAPA, and particularly its KATE2 project)
and the Network of Finnish Universities’ Chief IT Officers (FUCIO). One
of the focuses of these projects has been to find an alternative shared
datacenter facilities for higher education institutions with a view to
ensuring high quality, cost-effectiveness, compatibility and benefits
of scale.
CSC has played a major role in this effort, such as by engaging in
numerous one-on-one negotiations with universities to determine client needs and by opening up its own cost structure to higher education institutions for cost comparison purposes. Energy costs account
for a substantial share of the annual operating costs of a server room.
The collected information confirms the estimate that a shared datacenter facilities would yield substantial savings, particularly in energy
costs.
In December 2013, the Regional Council of Kainuu allocated EUR
2.5 million in EU structural funding (ERDF) to a joint project between
CSC and higher education institutions. In 2014-2015, the project will
build a modular, energy-efficient and cost-effective datacenter for
shared use by higher education institutions. The parties on board the
modular datacenter project are CSC, the Kajaani University of Applied
Sciences (KAMK), the CIO Network of Universities of Applied Sciences
(AAPA), the KATe2 project, which is building shared basic IT solutions
for higher education institutions, and the Network of Finnish Universities’ Chief IT Officers (FUCIO).
When the project is completed in early 2015, CSC Kajaani Datacenter will feature a new energy-efficient module for the shared use of
higher education institutions in accordance with jointly agreed operating principles.
Cooperation with the IT directors of
Higher Education Institutions
The research group of Professor Hannu
Häkkinen from the University of Jyväskylä
was granted 43 million computing hours
from the EU’s PRACE organization for a project
researching the interactions of nanometresized gold particles and enteroviruses.
Supercomputing will be performed at
HLRS-GAUSS in Stuttgart, one of Europe’s
largest computation centers.
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In 2013, CSC provided the CIO Network of Universities of Applied Sciences (AAPA) with IT Secretary General services and participated in seminars of the network as a service provider and expert. CSC’s experts also
actively participated in Special Interest Group (SIG) efforts organize by
AAPA and the Network of Finnish Universities’ Chief IT Officers (FUCIO)
as well as other expert groups, particularly those dealing with data warehouses, enterprise architectures, licences and cloud services.
FORGE
CSC is supplying an IaaS-level (Infrastructure as a Service) cloud service
platform for DIGILE’s FORGE Service Lab with financing from the Ministry
of Transport and Communications. The equipment is being acquired
in three phases in 2013 and 2014. The first phase was installed at Datacenter CSC Kajaani in August. The service is based on OpenStack cloud
middleware, which is used to manage virtual machines and the disk
space assigned to them. CSC is also participating in the development of
the FORGE project, focusing primarily on cloud platform development,
maintenance and support. The first pilot users will start using it at the
beginning of 2014. It is scheduled to go into full operation in April. The
pilot users include the Ministry of Finance’s JulkICTLab project. CSC was
involved in that project’s Pilviväylä training pilot.
FORGE Service Lab: http://www.digile.fi/forgeservicelab
JulkICTLab
The Ministry of Finance set up the JulkICTLab project to run from 1
September 2013 to 31 December 2014. CSC is responsible for its coordination. JulkICTLab will create a development platform for service
and innovation activities in public sector administration. It is intended
to promote the rapid deployment of services as well as cooperation and
interaction between users, service providers, organizers and developers, in line with the objectives of the public sector ICT strategy and open
knowledge program. The service development of JulkICTLab draws on
the data resources made available in the open data program as well as
the technical environment, cloud service capacity and service development support implemented in the FORGE project, which is funded by
the Ministry of Transport and Communications.
ELIXIR builds decentralised research infrastructure
for biological data in Europe
Finland’s ELIXIR node received an excellent rating in the updated roadmap for national research infrastructure (FIRI 2014-2018). The node
focuses on virtualization of services, data management, efficient
network connections and information security. Light paths for highperformance private telecommunications (1 Gb/sec) were built for
transferring biological data between CSC and the Turku, Oulu and Viikki biocenters and the London center of the European Bioinformatics
Institute EMBL-EBI, supplementing the current connections (Meilahti).
The light path connecting London and the Kajaani datacenter is also
part of a pilot project for transferring the massive amount of genomics data that ELIXIR has collected in Europe. CSC is responsible for the
Finnish node.
The pilot of the ELIXIR working group won an award in the international Enlighten Your Research competition. The concept of the pilot is
to divide virtual machines between research and education networks.
This concept ensures information security and makes it considerably
easier for researchers in different countries to discover significant
findings from the vast mass of biomedical data. A follow-up project is
being started up to build dynamic light paths and provide CSC’s cloud
services in the Netherlands.
Six new biomedical organizations joined the cloud service of the
Finnish node. The service handles several petabytes of genomics data
annually. The largest single user is the Meilahti campus. With the assistance of investments from FIRI, the disk space allocated for data pro-
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1 160
Cancer Genetics, HY
536
Anduril, HY
144
FIMM
Biocenter Viikki, HY
Cent. Biol. Seq.
Analysis, Denmark
Canine Genetics, HY
Structural
Bioinformatics, ÅA
Molecular neurology, HY
142
128
Canine Genetics, HY
48
University of Tartu, Estonia
48
0
14
Cancer Genetics, HY
Anduril, HY
192
Chipster, CSC
96
Function Genetics, HY
96
Molecular neurology, HY
Cent. Biol. Seq.
Analysis, Denmark
200
400
Pääkirjoitus
COOPERATION
FIMM, HY
© PRACE
Major pilot projects in ELIXIR project use CSC’s IaaS services (Infrastructure as a Service). Pilot projects use
CSC's virtual resources.
0
600 800 1000 1200 1400
50
100
150
200
The computing cores dedicated to ELIXIR cloud computing service.
HY=University of Helsinki, ÅA=Åbo Akademi University
Storage (TB) reserved for ELIXIR cloud computing pilot users.
cessing exceeded one petabyte. To provide this service, a new breed
of storage servers will be deployed in spring 2014 in Espoo and Kajaani. CSC’s up and running cloud service (Pouta) will be introduced as
part of the services of ELIXIR’s Finnish node.
CSC also completed the first version of its Resource Entitlement
Management System (REMS). It was taken into use in the management
of access rights to Nordic genetic reference data (Nordic Control Database) administered by the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland
(FIMM). FIMM and EMBL-EBI participated in the design and launch of the
tool. In 2014, its coverage will be expanded to other biomedical data and
other fields of science, such as the social sciences and linguistics.
Experts from CSC and the National Institute for Health and Welfare
(THL) created a pilot service for the project on a CSC platform.
ELIXIR’s Finnish node is part of the Biomedinfra consortium, an
integrated Finnish effort linking national and EU-level research infra-
structures for biobanking (BBMRI), bioinformatics (ELIXIR) and translational research (EATRIS) in order to analyze and utilize gene data from
biobanks. The Biomedinfra partners are CSC, the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) and the National Institute for Health and
Welfare (THL).
TB
PRACE
PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) is a research
infrastructure for high-performance computing comprised of 25
member countries. CSC represents Finland within PRACE, securing
access to world-class computing resources for high-level Finnish research projects.
CSC led the Tier-1 Work Package in the second implementation
phase project of PRACE, which also provided excellent opportunities
to promote the position of Finnish research projects. In 2013, six Finn-
PRACE participates in large HPC events to promote its services. PRACE announces bi-annual project calls for demanding computing projects.
ish Tier-1 projects were granted computation time and support from
international computation centers.
In the Tier-0 PRACE calls, three Finnish research groups were granted a record amount of computation time, a total of 153 million hours.
CSC played a key role in securing international resources. CSC provided research groups with support and consultation in application
processes. The Finnish research groups that were granted computation resources were headed by Professor Hannu Häkkinen (University of Jyväskylä), Professor Ilpo Vattulainen (Tampere University of
Technology) and Professor Kari Rummukainen (University of Helsinki).
CSC, the Swiss Centre for Scientific Computing (CSCS), SARA (Amsterdam Foundation for Academic Computing) and Bull have purchased a prototype of a next-generation supercomputer for CSC.
Although the equipment supplier changed, CSC ensured the acquisition of the next-generation Bull supercomputer (Intel Xeon Phis &
Nvidia GPGPUs) with 50% funding from the EU. The second phase of
the equipment will be installed in 2014. A call for project proposals for
the new system is currently ongoing in Finland. With the Bull system,
Finnish researchers will be able to test the latest accelerators and coprocessors in research use.
Elmer and GPAW – software packages that are important to many
Finnish researchers – were parallelized and optimized for higher efficiency and ported to Intel Xeon Phi architecture.
CSC also led the training and communications work packages in
the second and third implementation phase projects. EU evaluations
once again commended PRACE’s training and communications for
their proactiveness and innovativeness. The PRACE training – and in
particular the Advanced Training Centre (PATC) concept that CSC initi-
ated for PRACE – has proved to have a highly significant impact on the
development of computational science. CSC PRACE Advanced Training Centre (PATC) organized 11 courses in Finland and one in Sweden.
The number of participants was 212, of whom 174 were Finnish and
38 foreign.
EUDAT
The aim of the EUDAT (European Data Infrastructure) project is to create
a sustainable, Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI) for research data.
This cross-disciplinary pan-European project is co-funded by the European Commission’s FP7 program, and it is coordinated by CSC. EUDAT
provides different data services, such as storing and sharing data, and
metadata services for researchers in Europe. EUDAT’s data infrastructure
integrates research communities’ data, and enables search functions
and open data catalogues for researchers’ needs.
Benefits for Finnish researchers
CSC’s strong position in the lead of the EUDAT project has enabled to
take the needs of the Finnish researchers’ into account already from
the beginning of the project. EUDAT is beneficial especially to those
Finnish research communities which are doing international collaboration, and are looking for pan-European solutions for finding, sharing, storing, replicating, staging and performing computations with
primary and secondary research data. EUDAT is thus complementing
very well our current national infrastructure effort developed by TTA,
and will strengthen it by providing a seamless interface to European
resources. Finland’s strong participation to EUDAT – through CSC – is
also a means to ensure that European data infrastructure solutions
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develops according to Finnish interests and are in line with current
national investments and strategy.
Results and a look to the future
In 2013 EUDAT released the beta version of its Open Research Data Repository (B2SHARE) and CSC was selected as the first hosting site for
this service. This service will be beneficial to Finnish researchers involved in international projects and who want to share data generated
by these projects. CSC was also actively involved in the development
of other services, in particular the Joint Research Metadata Catalogue
(B2FIND), with a view to make it interoperable with the Finnish national
metadata catalogue (KATA). By harvesting the KATA metadata into the
EUDAT catalogue, valuable bodies of material collected in Finland can
be made visible (and potentially accessible) for broader international
use. In a similar way, Finnish researchers using KATA to find existing
data for re-use can be offered the possibility to include non-Finnish
data (coming from the EUDAT catalogue) into their results, which will
improve the added value of KATA for research purposes. Although EUDAT and TTA developed separately the two initiatives share in common some basic technologies and approaches which facilitate considerably their interoperability. The fact that CSC is involved in designing
and operating both infrastructures also allows us to ensure that the
two infrastructures remain interoperable and makes it possible to look
for synergies at technical and operational level.
16
Finnish researchers can take part to RDA activities by joining the
RDA Working and Interest Groups. The Research Data Alliance was
launched in March 2013 in Gothenburg, Sweden, and many Finnish
researchers took part to the event. The second Plenary meeting was
held in September 2013 in Washington D.C., USA.
European grid computing
CSC links the Finnish Grid Infrastructure (FGI) of universities with the
European Grid Infrastructure (EGI). The use of grid computing continued to grow in 2013. The number of billing units used in the Finnish Grid Infrastructure grew by about 20 percent, and the amount of
grid computing jobs by 60 percent. CSC proactively participated in
the testing of EGI’s grid software. Thanks to the uniform computing
environment implemented as a joint procurement with funding for
Finnish research infrastructure (FIRI), grid usage in Finland is more
cross-disciplinary than in many Central European countries, where
grid computing is primarily used in particle physics. In order to reach
new user communities, EGI will start deploying cloud technologies in
the production environment. This will be largely carried out in 2015.
CSC will also participate in the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration
project (NeiC) in 2014, which seeks to implement federated cloud infrastructure.
As part of the EU-funded FedSM project (Service Management
in Federated e-Infrastructures) CSC introduced more professional
service management practices for EGI and FGI with a view to developing a lighter service management concept in decentralized environments, where implementing an ITIL framework might be a heavy
task. Initial processes and documentation were produced in 2013.
In 2014, the next steps are training and certification for CSC and FGI
administrators.
Pääkirjoitus
COOPERATION
Photos courtesy of Andrès Arce Maldonado and Leif Laaksonen
The 2nd EUDAT conference was held in Rome in fall 2013.
The events arranged by RDA Europe in Finland have gathered participants from diverse backgrounds. At the same time the Ministry of
Education and Culture, among others, have received the possibility to
tell about their plans for a wide audience. The next joint event will take
place in May 2014 in Helsinki during the EGI Community Forum.
E-IRG
The e-IRG is an intergovernmental policy organization consisting of
national delegations from various European countries. It was founded to identify, formalise and disseminate the best practices and policies for the e-infrastructure ecosystem at both the national and European levels.
The e-IRGSP3 project assists the e-IRG in pursuing its work. In
2013, CSC participated mainly in the e-IRGSP3 Work Package 4 (Dissemination), which is responsible for reaching external stakeholders
and increasing awareness of the work and results of e-IRG. It targets
the e-infrastructures community at large, including service providers, users and policy makers.
In 2013, a conference was organize in Vilnius and the following
documents were produced: e-IRG White Paper 2012, e-IRG Task Force
Report on Legal Issues and e-IRG Roadmaps 2012. The documents
are available online at: www.e-irg.eu/publications.html.
CLARIN
CSC is playing an active role in the European CLARIN Common Languages and Technology Infrastructure. In 2013, CSC was recognized
as a CLARIN Type C center (metadata production).
CSC maintains and develops Language Bank services for use in
Finnish language research. In addition to language materials, the
Language Bank also features suitable data management and processing tools. CSC is part of the national FIN-CLARIN consortium,
which seeks to ensure Finland’s participation in and compatibility
with European CLARIN infrastructure.
CSC has developed Language Bank services such as LAT, Korp and
META-SHARE. New materials such as the digitized collections of the
National Library have been made available to Language Bank users.
CSC has improved the management of access rights to Language
Bank services and language materials.
Benefits for Finnish researchers
In 2013 RDA Europe arranged two seminars in Finland, and over 100
participants took part to these events. The attendees learned about
the current RDA Europe activities, which in turn helps to take part to
RDA’s Interest and Working Groups.
CSC’s strong involvement has developed the collaboration between RDA, EUDAT, OpenAIRE and TTA projects when practices how to
share global research data are being discussed.
RDA Europe offered grants for European Early Career researchers and scientists working with data to attend the 3rd RDA Plenary
meeting in Dublin, Ireland. Four Finnish researchers were awarded
a grant to take part to the Plenary in March 2014. This helps the researchers and Finland to stay in the forefront of utilizing research
data.
In autumn 2014 RDA will arrange its 4th Plenary in Amsterdam, the
Netherlands. Currently there are only few Finnish participants in the
RDA Interest and Working groups, but the amount of Finnish members
is steadily growing.
RDA Europe
Results and a look to the future
RDA Europe (Research Data Alliance Europe) is the European plug-in
to the Research Data Alliance (RDA). The goal of RDA is to accelerate
international data-driven innovation and discovery by facilitating research data sharing and exchange. CSC is coordinating the RDA Europe
project.
RDA Europe has created collaboration between several projects.
Within the ESFRI-infrastructure the most tangible results have been
achieved in the ICOS initiative (Integrated Carbon Observation System). Advancements have been made especially in the field of environmental sciences.
e-IRG Roadmap 2012
e-IRG Task Force Report
on Legal Issues
e-IRG
White Paper 2013
17
Pääkirjoitus
Core
activities
© Helsingin yliopisto
CSC maintains and develops the state-owned centralised information
technology infrastructure and uses it to provide national IT services for
the needs of research, education, culture and administration. Thanks to
the agreement made with the Ministry of Education and Culture, these
services are mainly available free of charge to researchers at higher education institutions.
Core activities
Funet, the Finnish Research and
Education Network
CSC operates and develops Funet, the Finnish Research and Education Network, for the specialised needs of research and higher education. Funet links higher education institutions and research institutes
and connects them to the global research network community and the
public Internet with superfast, reliable and secure connections. Funet’s
extensive services and wide-ranging expertise are at the disposal of the
entire Finnish research community and the government organizations.
In 2013, Funet had about 372,000 users in 78 member organizations.
A reliable and superfast research network
Usage of the Funet network continued to surge. Incoming traffic from
abroad was up 32 percent on 2012. At the end of 2013, 19 member organizations had fast 10 Gbit/s connections. Towards the end of the year, the
capacity of the network was increased in step with the growth in usage.
The reliability of the network remained high (99.99 percent), with
total annual downtime of 53 minutes per connection, including maintenance. Key services operated almost without any interruptions during
the year. Reliability was ensured with backup solutions for the network
and its services, systematic maintenance and upkeep, and 24/7 supervision.
The Funet network started preparing for capacity augmentation
taking into account the growing need for light path services and other
additional connections. The flexibility and diversity of the network connectivity will be enhanced in the near future. At the end of 2013, a total
of 149 light paths, backup connections and other additional connections were in use (2012: 132).
eduroam
The eduroam service enables smooth and secure wireless local area network roaming access on campuses in Finland and abroad without visitor
IDs. The eduroam campaign continued and as a result new higher education institutions joined the system. Service uptake saw even greater
growth: the total number of eduroam logins was 5,389,406 (2012:
1,648,188). All Finnish universities and half of universities of applied sciences now use this service. Further steps will be taken to improve the
coverage of eduroam, such as by offering installation support to higher
education institutions.
Information security
At the end of 2013, CSC unveiled its new cloud storage service, Funet
Boksi, which helps higher education institutions to store non-confidential files in the cloud. The Adobe Connect-based web conferencing
service Funet Team was used by nine member organizations. Uptake
of this service grew substantially in 2013. 14,318 files were transferred
through the Funet Filesender service (9-12/2012: 2,563). The typical
size of these files ranged from 10 to 100 Mb. Ten organizations were
using the router service supporting the use of the Funet network at the
end of 2013. The Funet Bridge HD video conferencing service was being
used by a total of six member organizations at year’s end.
Communications measures to improve awareness and adoption of
Funet services will continue. CSC will also test out joint campaigns with
higher education institutions.
Collaboration – a resource
The Funet Compass collaboration programme supported data communications services by organising workshops and publishing the best
practices in a number of fields. These activities were partly funded by
the Campus Best Practices efforts in the European Commission-supported GN3 and GN3+ projects of the European research networks.
CSC’s experts actively take part in the working groups and activities
of NORDUnet, TERENA, the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority, the RIPE community and the international security forum FIRST.
CSC also implements the .fi domain root name server for the Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority as a special service. In 2013,
CSC and the Government IT Shared Service Centre continued cooperation between Funet and the VY network for government agencies. Nine
Funet member organizations have also joined the VY network through
Funet.
Mbps
6 000
5 000
4 000
3 000
2 000
Funet CERT helped its members to deal with 740 information security
incidents. The popular certificate service, which is provided through European-wide public procurement, is now being used by as many as 60
Funet member organizations. Thanks to the launch of the automated
certificate ordering process, 1,250 certificates were provided in 2013
(2012: 973), providing substantial cost savings to the Funet community.
18
Other services
1 000
0
2008
2009
2010
Outbound
2011
2012
2013
Inbound
International Funet traffic 2008–2013 annual average data.
19
RAKETTI closing seminar was held in Heureka
– The Finnish Science Centre 28.3.2014.
20
Pääkirjoitus
Core
activities
Information management services support the
management, networks and administration
of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) by
providing IT consulting and planning as well
as cost-effective hosting services for shared
and centralised data systems.
Information management services
for education and research
Services created during the RAKETTI project
The six-year RAKETTI project ended in March 2014. CSC actively facilitated the work of the steering groups of different subprojects during
the entire period. Some of the services created during the project
have been – or will be – included in CSC’s offering.
Support for the data warehouse model for HEI was launched during the project period and developed further to a common data/
concept model. An information resource for HEI was created in the
RAKETTI-VIRTA project, which transfers statutory study information
into the national information resource. The information is available
when the new students apply to HEI studies in autumn 2014.
In addition to the RAKETTI project, CSC started the development
of bibliometric services in 2013 for the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Academy of Finland and the Federation of Finnish Learned
Societies (TSV). These services are based on publication data collected
HEI and the international reference database materials acquired in autumn 2013.
In cooperation with the National Library, CSC produced the Juuli
Finnish Research Publications data portal (www.juuli.fi), which includes publication forum classifications. An assessment tool (JFP) was
developed for the panellists working on the publication forum classifications. In addition, the Ministry of Education and Culture commissioned CSC to draft a preliminary study entitled “Researcher identification – national-level implementation alternatives”. As part of the
RAKETTI-TUTKI subproject, CSC invited representatives of research
support and administration networks to a joint seminar. The seminar
resulted in the establishment of a support network for research administration of HEI.
The RAKETTI-KOKOA subproject promoted cooperation in the
enterprise architecture and quality work of higher education institutions and maintained a support site for their overall architecture work.
A wide-ranging supplementary training programme (BISE) was successfully organize for the IT directors of higher education institutions.
CSC toured Finnish HEI in autumn 2013 to assess the status of their
overall architecture work. On the basis of these visits, a proposal on
the architectural principles of HEI was completed in February 2014.
CSC has worked with the KA-SIG network (special interest group of
those working on enterprise architecture at HEI) and organize several
meetings of the data warehouse forum. Data model cooperation was
presented at the European EuroCRIS organization with excellent results.
The RAKETTI-OPI subproject completed the first versions of reference architectures for teaching and study support services and administration at HEI, and published them in January 2014. The subproject also produced a report entitled “Electronic detection of plagiarism
at Finnish HEI 2013” and supported cooperation between the National
Board of Education and HEI in the student selection system overhaul.
It also carried out a preliminary study on the student and academic
Matti Hartikainen CIO at Tampere University of Applied Sciences
in RAKETTI closing seminar 28.3.2014.
year registration service (OILI) and then drafted a project plan. The OPI
subproject also developed the EDEN development environment for
shared use by HEI in order to support interoperability, and transferred
the Tenttis electronic exam application, which was developed by the
University of Tampere, to CSC for version management, distribution
and maintenance.
The TIPTOP project, run by CSC and nine higher education institutions, laid the groundwork for the identification and recognition
of prior learning (AHOT), individual study plans (HOPS) and real-time
monitoring of studies (ROS) services, and implemented a first demo.
Student Administration Services
CSC developed agile methods for the management of the Oodi system, which is used by ten universities. The Joopas service was transferred to a more secure platform. CSC held discussions with universities on the future of the Avoinyliopisto.fi service and the plans of
the universities with respect to similar services offered by the National Board of Education. CSC installed the PEPPI system, developed
by Metropolia and the Tampere University of Applied Science for
planning teaching, into a test environment for new higher education
clients.
21
Eduuni services
use in the management of access rights to genetic research data for
bioinformatics (Nordic Control Database). The launch of the REMS system was kicked off with the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.
CSC studied and piloted the Moonshot technique, which was developed in an EU project and enables, for instance, SSH logins to CSC’s
computing servers with Haka IDs. It is intended that the pilot will be
expanded to higher education institutions in 2014.
CSC has provided Eduuni services to support networked activities in
the administrative sector of the Ministry of Education and Culture and
its stakeholders since 2011. Eduuni provides SharePoint workspaces
for networks and projects. At the end of 2013, there were 534 workspaces, representing year-on-year growth of 24%.
Eduuni is built around work e-mail address-based Eduuni-ID identity management. The user can choose his or her own login method,
and user rights are granted to the work e-mail address. About 3,500
users from 500 organizations have registered for Eduuni-ID. In autumn 2013, Eduuni-ID was made available for the use of the organizations’ own services as well.
Hosting services
CSC provides IT hosting services for many of its client organizations.
Hosting services clients in 2013 included the National Audiovisual Archive, Certia, the National Board of Education, the Academy of Finland,
the National Archive, the Finnish National Gallery and library consortiums, including the library cooperation consortium of universities of
applied science, the FinELib consortium and the Linnea 2 consortium.
As in earlier years, client satisfaction was either good or excellent in
2013. In addition to maintaining hosting services, CSC both developed
and expanded them. Over and above the successful maintenance of
services, CSC seeks to enter into more partnerships in suitable national IT system projects.
Identity and access management services
The number of Haka user identification system users surged in 2013.
Haka now provides 163 services, four times as many as the number of
home organizations using it. Haka’s sister system, the Virtu user identification system for civil servants, made a great leap forward in 2013
when 22 new bureaus joined it.
The Resource Entitlement Management System (REMS) for scientific research data was completed in 2013. The system was taken into
1 921 640
FinELib/Nelli-portal
1 318 114
Univ. Oulu/Optima learning environment
1 223 301
Polyt. Jyväskylä/Optima
960 257
TTY/Moodle2 learning environment
867 515
Univ. Jyväskylä/Optima
Polyt. Savonia/Moodle
851 286
Discendum/Optima
837 250
562 378
Rondo
Univ. Helsinki/Moodle
Univ. Helsinki/Unisport
Polyt. HAMK/Moodle
385 441
254 140
228 196
1 478 338
Other
0
500 000
1 000 000
1 500 000
2 000 000
Haka federation and identity management system is a gateway to over 160 services.
There were over 11 million registrations in Haka services 2013.
22
2 500 000
Core activities
Fusion researchers Taina Kurki-Suonio (on the right) and Otto
Asunta, Aalto University. The Fusion and Plasma Physics Group of
the Department of Applied Physics focuses on researching fusion
energy and solving the problems of zero-emissions energy production.
Pääkirjoitus
Core
activities
“The Library Network Services of the
National Library of Finland promote
information availability in Finland by
acquiring materials, ensuring the
availability of open access materials,
and developing these information
systems so that access to data is as easy
as possible and the user can access
information regardless of his or her
location.”
NATIONAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES
FOR SCIENCE AND CULTURE
CSC’s national data infrastructure services for science and culture
maintain and develop data- and information-related services, like data
management, re-use, digital preservation and usability services.
In 2013, CSC’s national data infrastructure services for science and
culture promoted interoperability by means of defining digital processes, metadata model development, stakeholder work and shared
infrastructure services, of which the most important is the digital reservation service for cultural materials, launched in December. Shared
and interoperable infrastructures and related services enable research
system actors to pool their forces, focus on their specific tasks, and
utilize services, resources and expertise on a broader scale.
CSC promoted digital preservation by piloting an ingest service
with materials from actors involved in the National Digital Library project and preparing a detailed cost analysis of research data preservation. The new digital preservation service will help safeguard Finland’s
cultural heritage.
Work on the enterprise architecture improves understanding and
development of functional entities. Within the framework of the National Research Data Initiative (TTA) of the Ministry of Education and
Culture, a vision for the research data infrastructure and a description
of its present condition were prepared, and the current maturity level
of universities’ research data management was evaluated. A minimum
metadata model specifying what information about research data
should be recorded, was drafted to facilitate the exchange of metadata and enhance the interoperability of metadata services.
Collaboration is essential when building the data infrastructure.
CSC toured a wide range of higher education institutions to assess
service needs and awareness of the services as well as to present and
provide advice on current data infrastructure services. The National
Research Data Initiative published an Internet site (http://www.tdata.
fi/) and a data management guide. Many seminars and theme events
were held on the topics of research data and digital preservation.
CSC supported the digitalization of research processes through
enterprise architecture work by increasing shared understanding of
these processes and building digital support services. The National
Digital Library project’s data search service (FINNA) was launched in
2013. FINNA collects materials from archives, libraries and museums,
and is maintained by CSC.
The beta version of the open access publishing platform AVAA was
released by the National Research Data Initiative (TTA) of the Ministry
of Education and Culture. The AVAA service improves open access to
research data from various academic fields. For example, the pilot applications include the atmospheric measurement data of the University of Helsinki and web distribution of location data (OpenStreetMap).
In 2014, CSC will complete projects such as a teaching application for
the utilization of open access particle physics data from Cern CMS
testing as well as web services (WMS and WFS) for the distribution of
the dialect map data of the Institute for the Languages of Finland.
The active deployment of the IDA research data storage service
began in 2013. A new tape storage environment was introduced in
the background to support the preservation of materials. The database service process became more widely available. The Kata research
metadata service was piloted and and is being deployed in 2014.
Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen, Director, Library Network
Services, The National Library of Finland.
25
Pääkirjoitus
Core
activities
© Arto Tulima
CSC maintains and develops a top-notch
computing environment. CSC helps researchers
to harness computing resources and scientific
software by offering IT expert services and training.
Scientific computing services for
higher education institutions
Support for computing environments
➓
➈
➄
➆
➂
➇
➁
➍
Expert support
➅
➀
The Ministry of Education and Culture set up the
Computational Science Forum for the years 2013-2015
to evaluate the suitability and cost-effectiveness
of CSC’s scientific computation at higher
education institutions.
From left bottom Chair of the Forum vice rector Taina
Pihlajaniemi (1) Oulu University, Professor Jouko Lampinen (2) Aalto university,vice rector Kalle-Antti Suominen
(3) University of Turku, Head of unit, Earth observation,
Minna Palmroth (4) Finnish Meteorological Institute,
Counsellor of Education Juha Haataja (5) Ministry of
Education and Culture, Senior Adviser Sami Niinimäki
(6) Ministry of Education and Culture, Specialist Tiina
Heikkinen (7) Metropolia University of Applied Sciences,
IT Manager Minna Harjuniemi (8) University of Helsinki,
Specialist in Computational Science Forum, Director
Pekka Lehtovuori (9) CSC and Secretary, Senior Coordinator Kirsi Hepolehto (10) CSC. Missing from the photo:
Director Pentti Pulkkinen Academy of Finland and the
Leading Technology Specialist Timo Taskinen, Tekes.
26
In 2013, CSC organized numerous client events in various localities to
ensure that its new computing resources meet client needs and can be
put into effective use right away. These tours reached a total of 356 researchers and CSC received plenty of valuable feedback from clients.
The transition to the new computing resources thus went smoothly
and their utilization rate was high from day one. The efficient launch
of the new computing resources (Sisu and Taito) required CSC’s experts to play an active role in porting and optimizing clients’ code and
applications. New user manuals and a new general guidebook on the
computing environment facilitated utilization. In addition to updating
the manuals, CSC bolstered its HelpDesk services to ensure a better
client experience.
In 2014, CSC aims to carry out the second phase of the system update as efficiently as possible and will organize another university tour
to provide orientation for the users. The Bull prototype also enables
clients to test the latest technology.
CSC helps researchers by offering a wide range of scientific applications
and user support for them. CSC’s support for computing science comprises help with methods, a licence service, coordination of software
consortiums, training and course services and visualization services.
CSC’s scientific software is used by a large share of Finnish universities and research groups in many fields of science. The largest user
groups for these application services are the biosciences, language
research and chemistry.
The usability of scientific application services was excellent in
2013. Licence service processes, quality and information security
have been enhanced in accordance with CSC’s guidelines for critical
services. CSC’s experts organize many courses, which have received
excellent feedback. In 2014, CSC’s scientific services will be developed
and offered on new platforms, such as CSC’s cloud and accelerated
servers. CSC will also invest in support for the processing and analysis
of high-volume data.
The user-friendly Chipster software, developed by CSC, provides
a comprehensive range of analysis and visualization tools for the
needs of bioscience and medical science. Six new versions of Chipster were released in 2013. More than 40 new analysis tools were
added to Chipster and its genome selection was expanded on the
basis of clients’ wishes. Chipster can be used to analyze gene activity, regulation and changes as well as their interrelations. Chipster
supports a variety of gene data measurement technologies such as
microchips and next generation sequencing (NGS). NGS technology
has revolutionized biological research. However, efficient data analysis methods are required to harness its full potential. Data and results can be visualized in their genome context with Chipster’s builtin genome visualizer. The visualizer was expanded and its efficiency
was stepped up significantly in 2013. As NGS data is typically large
(dozens of gigabytes), Chipster’s data management is also under
continuous development.
In future, CSC will develop software services for user-friendly dataintensive computation. This new service will be built on existing infrastructure, combining components of the cloud computing system
and Chipster data analysis environment.
CSC’s development of the Elmer software (multiphysical modelling tool based on the finite element method) focuses on challenging
electromagnetic problems to address the needs of industry. This work
will continue in 2014, primarily with external funding. University and
industry partners are on board its development. Commercial consulting agreements have also been made in other application areas.
Elmer also plays a growing role in the three-dimensional modelling
of glaciers, which is particularly important in assessing the impacts of
climate change. The latest noteworthy international IPCC report mentions nine scientific publications that made use of Elmer.
5%
1% 5%
38 %
5%
Total
201,6 million
billing units
8%
Software products and development
CSC streamlined its software development with wider adoption of agile methods. Development teams have been bolstered and their work
has been centralized on shared platforms.
Two major updates were made to the Scientist’s User Interface
(SUI), introducing an overhauled portal theme, access to the new computing servers Sisu and Taito, and several new features, such as for
customer project management. The number of users grew by 20 percent in 2013. One of the future focuses of development is CSC’s electronic services, thanks to which the Scientist’s User Interface will be
able to serve the entire client base better. In addition, some services
will be made available to the general public.
1%
14 %
23 %




Physics
Nanoscience
Chemistry
Biosciences
 Astrophysics
 Computational fluid
dynamics
 Materials sciences
 Computational drug
design
 Other
Usage of processor time by discipline 2013. The largest user groups
were physics, nanoscience and chemistry.
27
Pääkirjoitus
ORGANIZATION
© Susanna Savolainen
CSC invests in the wellbeing of its personnel
by means such as offering the opportunity
to participate in supported fitness and club
activities.
ORGANIZATION
Personnel
Corporate governance
After several consecutive years of growth, CSC’s number of personnel did not increase in 2013. In order to maintain its employer image
and raise its visibility, CSC has continued to focus on recruitment marketing and participation in events. In 2013, CSC also took part in recruitment fairs held on the campuses of higher education institutes.
CSC’s employer image remained good – for instance, CSC placed 21st
in a field of 50 in the Universum employer image survey. In 2012, CSC
ranked 20th out of 47.
For a few years now, CSC has used a career path model. The career
path ensures and structures the development of experts in their job
tasks. At the same time, CSC also assesses interest in job rotation and
learning new competences. With the career path model, CSC seeks to
enhance work motivation and to both encourage and motivate employees to participate in internal job rotation. The career path model
also provides alternatives for the planning of professional development in CSC’s future positions. In order to enable professional development and internal job rotation, CSC provides the necessary training
and orientation, and uses numerous methods to support on-the-job
learning.
CSC measures occupational well-being once every two-years. The
next survey will be carried out in autumn 2014. CSC takes many steps
to ensure occupational well-being in a changing work environment.
One example is the early intervention model launched in early 2013
with a view to taking a preventative approach to ensure the well-being
of individual employees and the work community as a whole.
As of 31 December 2013, CSC had 254 employees. The average
number of employees was 254 and number of person-years 251. The
age distribution is good, with an average age of 41. The average time
of service was 8.2 years.
14 new permanent employees started at CSC and 13 permanent
employees left the company. The employee turnover rate (5.5%) saw
slight year-on-year growth (2012: 3.5%).
The governance of CSC is based on the Finnish Limited Liability Companies Act and the CSC Articles of Association. As a non-listed company,
CSC has decided to comply with, as appropriate, the Finnish Corporate Governance Code (1 October 2010) for listed companies issued by
the Securities Market Association. In addition, CSC governance is also
guided by the "Government Resolution on Ownership Policy issued on
3 November 2011".
CSC’s statutory administrative bodies consist of the General Meeting
of Shareholders, the Board of Directors and the Managing Director. The
operative management of the company is under the responsibility of
the Managing Director together with the Management Group.
•• Permanent:
235 (93 %)
•• Fixed-term:
19 (7 %)
Age distribution:
•• under 30 yrs. 4%
•• 30 - 39 yrs. 44%
•• 40 - 49 yrs. 36%
•• 50 yrs. and over 16%
Gender distribution: •• Average age: 41 yrs.
•• Men: 74 %
•• Women: 26 %
Education
distribution:
•• Basic and vocational
19%
•• University of applied
sciences 12%
•• University 50%
•• Post-graduate
degrees 19%
General Meeting of Shareholders
The Annual General Meeting (AGM) is the highest decision-making organ.
The AGM must be held by the end of June and is convened by the Board
of Directors. The General Meeting of Shareholders addresses the items
assigned to it in accordance with the Finnish Limited Liability Companies
Act and the CSC Articles of Association.
Notice of a General Meeting must be issued to shareholders verifiably in writing no earlier than four weeks and no later than eight days
before the meeting.
CSC Board of Directors
CSC's Board of Directors is comprised of 4–7 regular members. The
Board members are elected at the AGM. As stipulated in the Articles of
Association, the Board members' terms of office expire at the end of
the AGM following their election.
The Board of Directors shall constitute a quorum if over half of the
regular members, one being the Chair or, if the Chair is unable to attend,
the Vice Chair, are present.
The AGM elects the Chair and Vice Chair to the Board of Directors.
Although the Managing Director is not a Board member, he/she serves
as a reporting official and secretary in meetings. The Board of Directors
complies with the procedure approved on 19 March 2010 in its meetings.
The Board of Directors convened 7 times in 2013. CSC has no committees.
The Board members' personal information with responsibilities and
outside interests is presented later in this Annual Report.
Duties of the Board
In accordance with the Finnish Limited Liability Companies Act, the
Board of Directors oversees company administration and the proper
organization of its operations. The Board is also responsible for ensuring that the company's accounting and finances are properly handled.
29
Internal control, risk management and internal auditing
The Board of Directors oversees administration of the company and
the proper organization of operations. Working in co-operation with
the Management Group, the Managing Director is responsible for ensuring the legality and reliability of accounting, financial affairs and
routine operations.
CSC's management and governance policy guidelines specify how
operational control and oversight are to be carried out, how matters
involving these are approved and how matters are monitored.
The financial development of the company is monitored on a
monthly basis through a financial accounting control system. The
system includes the income statement, balance sheet, cash flow,
forecast for the current fiscal period, and other key transactions.
Realization of the company's financial and operational plan is
monitored and compared each month with the actual financial performance. CSC uses a unit-specific financial reporting system. It is
used to monitor the realization of profit center financial and operational plans.
As there is no dedicated organization for internal auditing, responsibility for this function is divided according to the division of
Ice skating group on CSC´s winter sports day in February 2014.
Each Board member is required to keep confidential all company
information disclosed to them while serving as Board members.
Auditing of accounts
The company has one regular auditor, which is an authorized public
accounting company. The auditor's term of office expires at the end
of the AGM following the auditor's election.
The auditor reviews financial statements, accounting and governance.
In 2012, the AGM elected PricewaterhouseCoopers Oy, Authorized Public Accountants, as the company auditor, with Leena
Puumala (APA) serving as the principal auditor.
Managing Director
The Board of Directors appoints the Managing Director of the company. The Managing Director’s terms of office are specified in a written agreement approved by the Board of Directors. The Managing
Director oversees the daily administration of the company in accordance with the guidelines and orders issued by the Board of Directors. The Managing Director has no further pension arrangements
outside the statutory pension scheme.
© Katri Kulju
The Board of Directors promotes the interests of the company and all
shareholders. In carrying out its duties, the Board may:
•• convene the General Meeting
•• guide and control the current management
•• appoint and dismiss the Managing Director of the company
•• approve the Managing Director's contract and other benefits
•• approve any incentive bonuses for the company, the principles
for granting incentives and an incentive bonus for the Managing
Director
•• monitor the work atmosphere and its development
•• approve the company risk management principles and conduct
annual reviews of key operational risks and their management
•• validate the company's long-term strategic and financial objectives and constantly monitor their realization
•• assemble at least once a year without current management
present
•• approve the budget
•• approve the financial statements and Board of Directors’ report
•• validate its own agenda, which must be checked each year
•• assess the implementation and validity of administration and
control systems (Corporate Governance) at least once a year
responsibility for the company as a whole. Internal auditing is conducted by financial management in cooperation with other managers and the auditor. The requirements set for internal audits are
taken into consideration in audits conducted by the auditor.
CSC’s Financial Director is responsible for company cash management and investments in accordance with the specific guidelines set
by the Board of Directors.
The auditor meets with the Board of Directors at least once a year
and reports on key issues affecting the company. Additionally, the
auditor and company management meet at least twice a year. The
auditor meets with financial management at least four times a year.
CSC risk management was conducted in accordance with the updated Risk Management Plan and approved residual risks. CSC risk
management is part of CSC's annual continuity planning.
CSC's core processes and some services are carried out in accordance with higher security requirements set for information security
in public administration. The security and quality of CSC services
and internal functions have been further developed by improving
technical monitoring, fault response times, and the monitoring of
availability. CSC also plays a special role in the national critical infrastructure, which sets special requirements for securing core operations during system failures and emergencies.
Deputy Managing Director
The Board of Directors may appoint a Deputy Managing Director. At
the end of the 2013 financial period, no one has been appointed to
the position of Deputy Managing Director.
Management Group
The Management Group is chaired by the Managing Director. The
Management Group sets strategic policies, prepairs operating plans
and the budget, plans investments and monitors their implementation, allocates resources and decides on key operations, major operational issues, and oversees the implementation of its decisions. In
2013, the management Group convened 11 times. The Management
Group members' personal information with responsibilities and outside interests is presented later in this Annual Report.
CSC´s Nice Run team in 2013.
30
31
Pääkirjoitus
ORGANIZATION
In accordance with the decision made at the AGM in 2013, the Board
Chair shall be paid 900 €/month, the Vice Chair 600 €/month and
Board members 500 €/month. In addition to this, the Board Chair,
Vice Chair and Board members shall be paid 250 €/meeting. Auditor
fees are paid as invoiced.
The Board of Directors decides on the compensation for management. In addition to the salary, the Board decides on the incentive
bonuses to be paid to the Managing Director, Board members and
other personnel, depending on how effectively the company mission, vision, core values and strategic goals have been adhered to.
The company has not issued option loans or offered stock options.
Pääkirjoitus
© Heta Koski
Compensation
Pääkirjoitus
ORGANIZATION
Management Group and Board of Directors
– Personal information with responsibilities
and outside interests
Management Group 31 December 2013
Managing Director
Kimo Koski (b. 1964)
D.Sc. (Tech.)
Employment history summary:
• CSC, Managing Director, 2004–
• Nokia Technology Platform Engineering Environment,
Strategy and Roadmaps Manager, 2004
• Nokia Research Center, IT Manager, 2000–2003
• CERN, Switzerland, Scientific Associate, 1996–1997
• CSC, positions as Manager and Specialist, 1989–2000
Board member since:
• Secretary of the CSC Board of Directors 2004
Summary of concurrent confidential posts:
• European Data Infrastructure (EUDAT), coordinator
• NeIC (Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration) steering
board member
Director, Data Services for Science and Culture
Pirjo-Leena Forsström (b. 1959)
Ph.D.
• CSC, Director, Data Services for Science and Culture, 2007−
• CSC, Director, Data and Information Services, 2007−2011
• Research grant (Academy of Finland, Vaisala), 2005–2007
• University of Helsinki, Research Assistant, Assistant, Amanuensis,
1981–1987
• SNIC, Board member, 2013–
• National Research Data Project, Secretary General, 2012–
• National Digital Library, steering and management group member,
2010–, permanent adviser to the management group, 2011–
• Netherlands eScience Center Advisory Board, Holland, member,
2011–
• JHS Geographic Information Systems, steering group member,
2010–
• National Digital Library, information management steering group,
member, 2011–
Director, Information Management Services
Janne Kanner (b. 1973)
M.Sc.
• CSC, Director, 2007–
• CSC, Technology Director, 2004–2007
• CSC, Development Manager, 2002–2004
• CSC, Specialist, 1999–2002
• University of Jyväskylä, 1998–1999
• Vapo Oy (part-time), 1992–1998
32
• NORDUnet A/S Board member, 2004−
Chairman of the Board, 2008–2010
Vice-chairman of the Board, 2010-2012
• Otaverkko Oy, Board member, 2009−
• TIVIT Oy, Board member, 2010−2013
Vice Managing Director
Tiina Kupila-Rantala (b. 1963)
Ph.D., Master of Business Administration
• CSC, Vice Managing Director, 2011–
• CSC, Director, Business and Operational Development, 2010–2011
• Nokia Networks, Project Manager, 2001
• CSC, Systems Specialist, 1996–2001
• University of Helsinki, Department of Physics, Assistant,
Scholarship Researcher (Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation,
Magnus Ehrnrooth Foundation), 1992–1996
• Nokia Telecommunications, System Analyst, 1990–1991
• Chrysopoeia Oy, Board member
CSC's management group 31.12.2014 (from left to right): Pekka Lehtovuori, Janne Kanner, Atte Sillanpää, Tero Tuononen, Klaus Lindberg,
Jari Rajala and Per Öster. In front from left: Kimmo Niittuaho, Tiina Kupila-Rantala and Kimmo Koski. Missing from the photo:
Pirjo-Leena Forsström.
Director, Services for research
Pekka Lehtovuori (b. 1973)
Ph.D.
• CSC, Director, Services for research, 2013–
• CSC, positions as Manager and Specialist, 2001-2013
• FBD Ltd. Senior scientist, 2002-2005
• University of Jyväskylä, Researcher, 1997–2001
• Scientific computing collaboration forum, specialist
• European Grid Initiative (EGI) Council, vice representative for Finland
• Cloud software-program, steering group, member
• FORGE steering group nominated by the
Ministry of Transport and Communications, member
Financial Director
Kimmo Niittuaho (b. 1966)
M.Sc. (Econ.)
• CSC, Financial Director, 2011–
• CSC, Financial Manager, 2003–2011
• Pirelli Oy, Controller, 2001–2003
• LM Ericsson Oy, Business controller, 2000–2001
• AKB Services, Controller, 1995–2000
Toppi Oy, Board member, 2013–
Director, Customer and service integration
Klaus Lindberg (b. 1958)
M.Sc. (Tech.)
• CSC, Director Customer and service integration, 2013–
• CSC, Director, Information Management Services, 2002–2013
• Helsinki University of Technology, Research Assistant, 1984–1989
• RAKETTI steering group nominated by the Ministry of Education,
member
• Member of the SADe project "Oppijan palvelukokonaisuus" cluster
• OpIT working group nominated by the Ministry of Education, member
Application Specialist, Personnel representative in administration
Atte Sillanpää (b. 1972)
Ph.D.
• CSC, Application Specialist, 2005–
• University of Naples Federico II, Italy, Researcher, 2004–2005
• University of Oulu, Researcher, 1997–2004
• CSC, Personnel representative in administration, 2010–
HR Director
Jari Rajala (b. 1971)
M.A. (Education)
• CSC, HR Director, 2011–
• CSC, HR Manager, 2007–2011
• CSC, Administrative Director, 2004–2007
Director, ICT Platforms
Tero Tuononen (b. 1971)
M.Sc. (Computer Science)
• CSC, Director, ICT Platforms, 2010–
• CSC, Manager, Information Management, 2009–2010
• Nokia Technology Platforms, IT Manager/Solutions Manager,
2005–2006
• Nokia Research Center, IT Manager, 2001–2005
• Nokia Research Center, IT Specialist, 1996–2001
33
Members of the Board of Directors
Professor, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT)
Director
Samuel Kaski (b. 1968)
D.Sc. (Tech.) (Chair since 2012)
• TKK/Aalto University, Professor, 2005−
• University of Helsinki, Professor, 2004−2005
• Academy Researcher, 2001−2004
Board member since: 2012
• Finnish Centre of Excellence in Computational Inference Research,
Co-director
• Finnish Doctoral Programme in Computational Sciences, Director
• PASCAL2, EU Network of Excellence, Board member
• Biocentrum Helsinki, Board member
Counsellor of Education, Ministry of Education and Culture
Erja Heikkinen (b. 1964)
Ph.D., Docent
• Ministry of Education and Culture, Counsellor of Education, 2005−
• Tekes, Technology Specialist, 2001−2005
• University of Helsinki, Adjunct Professor, 2001−
• CSC – Scientific Computing Ltd, Biosciences Specialist, 1997−2001
• Academy of Finland Junior Researcher at the University of Tübingen
(Germany) and University of California, Davis (USA), 1992−1995
• Biocenter Oulu, Coordinator, 1995−1997
34
Pääkirjoitus
ORGANIZATION
Professor, University of Helsinki
Katri JohaNna Björkroth (b. 1964)
Professor of Food Hygiene
• University of Helsinki, Professor of Food Hygiene, 2002−
• University of Helisnki, Vice-Rector, 2008–2013
• University of Helsinki, Department of Food Hygiene and
Environmental Health, 1991−2012
• Federal Research Centre for Nutrition, Karlsruhe, Germany,
1998−1999
• Ludvig Maximiliams Universitet, Germany, Guest Professor, 2009
• Applied and Environmental Microbiology journal, Scientific editor,
2013–
• Vice-Rector, University of Helsinki, 2008–2013
CEO, Gateway Technolabs Finland Oy
Pentti Heikkinen (b. 1960)
M.Sc. (Econ.), University of Jyväskylä
Stanford Executive Program diploma,
Stanford Graduate School of Business
• Gateway Technolabs Finland Oy, CEO, 2008−
• TietoEnator Corp., President and CEO, 2006−2007
• TietoEnator Corp., Chief Operating Officer, 2004−2005
• TietoEnator Corp., Telecom & Media Division, President, 2001−2003
• TietoEnator Corp., Services Division, President, 1999−2000
• Tieto Corp., Public Administration Division, President, 1996−1998
• VTKK Government Systems Ltd, Managing Director, 1994−1995
• CapGemini Finland, Director, 1991−1993
• VTKK Group, Director, 1987−1990
• VTKK, Management Consultant, 1985−1986
• Aditro AB, Member of the Board, 2010−2013
• Basware Oyj, Member of the Board, 2009−
• Tecnotree Oyj, Member of the Board, 2009−
Director General, National Archivist,
National Archives Service of Finland
Jussi Nuorteva (b. 1954)
D.Theol., Phil.Lic., Docent
• Director General, National Archives Service of Finland, 2003−
• University of Helsinki, Docent, 1998−
• Finnish Literature Society, Secretary General, 2000−2003
• Academy of Finland, Secretary General of the Research Council for
Culture and Society, 1998−2000
Board member since: 2007 (Deputy Member), 2008 (Member)
• The Chancery of the Orders of the White Rose of Finland and
of the Lion of Finland, Vice Chancellor
• National Board of Heraldry, Chair
• University of Helsinki, Scientific Advisory Board at the Centre for
European Studies, Chair
• Alliance for Permanent Access, Board member
• Finnish National Commission for UNESCO, Member
© Eeva Vierros
Director, Research Infrastructures
Per Öster (b. 1959)
Ph.D.
• CSC, Director, Research Infrastructures, 2013–
• CSC, Director, Research Environments, 2010–2013
• CSC, Director, Application Services, 2007–2010
• KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden,
Parallelldatorcentrum (PDC), Associate Director, 2001−2007
Parallelldatorcentrum (PDC), Associate Director, Research and
Customer Relations, 1996−2001
Parallelldatorcentrum (PDC), Project Manager, Industrial
Applications, 1994–1996
• Volvo Data AB, Gothenburg, Sweden, Consultant, Applied
Mathematics, 1992–1994
• Volvo Data AB, Gothenburg, Sweden, System Analyst and Product
Manager, Technical Computing, 1990–1992
• Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg,
PhD grant and PhD research position, 1984–1990
• European Grid Initiative (EGI) Executive board member, 2013–
• European Grid Initiative (EGI) Council, chairman, 2009−2012
• EGI.eu Foundation Executive Board, chairman, 2010−2012
• Finnish Graduate School in Computational Sciences (FICS), Strategic
Committee member, 2010−
CSC's Board of Directors 2013 (from left to right): Jussi Nuorteva, Erja Heikkinen, Jouko Paaso, Johanna Björkroth, Samuel Kaski, Mari Walls,
Pentti Heikkinen, Kimmo Koski.
Rector, Managing director, Oulu University of Applied Sciences (OAMK)
Docent, University of Vaasa
Jouko Paaso (b. 1956)
D.Sc. (Tech.), eMBA
• Oulu University of Applied Sciences, Rector, 2013–
• Oulu University of Applied Sciences, Managing director, 2012–
• Oulu University of Applied Sciences (OAMK), Rector, 2009−2013
• Vaasa University of Applied Sciences (VAMK), Rector, 2004−2009
• Pehr Brahe Software Laboratory, Director, 2001−2004
• University of Oulu, Raahe Unit (within the OAMK University of
Applied Sciences Raahe Unit), Unit Director, Acting Professor,
1994−2004
• Fraunhofer-Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung, Darmstadt,
Germany, Visiting Researcher, 1993−1994
• Raahe School of Engineering and Business, Information Technology,
Senior Lecturer, 1990−1993
• VTT Electronics Laboratory, Oulu, CAE Division, Researcher, 1982−1990
• LM Ericsson, Software Design Division, Software Designer,1981−1982
• RAKETTI Information Management project, Steering group member
• Virtual University of Applied Sciences, (national) Chair of
Management Group
• POEM Foundation, Board member
• Oulu Innovation Alliance (OIA), Management group member
• Barents Advisory Board Finland, member
• The Association of Entrepreneurs, Oulu Region, Education
Committee member
• Regional Council of Oulu, Coordination group of Education and
Research, member
• Nordea bank Oulu, Controller
Director, Professor, Finnish Environment Institute,
Marine Research Centre
Anna-Mari WalLs (b. 1961)
Ph.D., Docent
• Finnish Environment Institute, Marine Research Centre, Director,
Professor and Board member 2009−
• MTT Agrifood Research, Research Director, 2008−2009
• MTT Agrifood Research, Environmental Research, Programme
Director, 2006−2007
• University of Turku, Professor (acting), 2004−2005
• University of Turku and Academy of Finland, FIBRE Programme
Director, 1997−2003
• Maj and Tor Nessling Foundation, head of Research, 1995−1997
• Research Council for Biosciences and Environment at the Academy
of Finland, Member, 2010−2015
• Finnish Forest Research Institute (Metla) Board member,
2012−2015
• Finnish Game and Fisheries Research Institute (RKTL),
Board member, 2012−2015
• WWF Finland, Board member, 2010−
35
CSC's organization 31.12.2013
Common services
Tiina Kupila-Rantala
Vice Managing Director
HR & Office services
Jari Rajala
HR Director
Financial services
Kimmo Niittuaho
Financial Director
Internal ICT
Sami Salonen
Development Manager
Ministry of education
and culture consulting
Sami Saarikoski
Development Manager
Communications
Anne Björklund
Communications Manager
Information
management serviceS
Janne Kanner
Director
Funet services
Harri Kuusisto
Development Manager
Student administration
services
Jorma Korkiakoski
Development Manager
Identity and access
management solutions
Manne Miettinen
Development Manager
Information infrastructure services
Pirjo-Leena Forsström
Director
Research data
management services
Dan Still
Development Manager
Information
infrastructure
production services
Johanna Viljanen
Development Manager
Digital Preservation
Services
Kimmo Koivunen
Development Manager
Metadata services
Tuija Raaska
Development Manager
Kimmo Koski
Managing Director
Services for research
Pekka Lehtovuori
Director
Data Integration and
Business Intelligence
Antti Mäki
Development Manager
HPC programming
support
Jussi Heikonen
Development Manager
Computing
environments
Jura Tarus
Development Manager
Service integration
Jussi Tella
Development Manager
Customer, project and
contract administration
Marita Pajulahti
Development Manager
Software product
development
Aleksi Kallio
Development Manager
Research
infrastructures
Per Öster
Director
Customer and service
integration
Klaus Lindberg
Director
ICT Platforms
Tero Tuononen
Director
36
Managed services
Totti Mäkelä
Development Manager
Computing Platforms
Olli-Pekka Lehto
Development Manager
Storage Platforms
Samuli Saarinen
Development Manager
Datacenter solutions
Jukka-Pekka Partanen
Development Manager
Networks
Teemu Kiviniemi
Development Manager
Service Production
Platforms
Janne Niemi
Development Manager
Support for
computational science
Ville Savolainen
Development Manager
Life Science Center Keilaniemi
Keilaranta 14, P.O. BOX 405
FI – 02101 Espoo, FINLAND
CSC – IT CENTER FOR SCIENCE LTD.
www.csc.fi

Annual Report 2013

Transcription

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