FCCI Predecessors

The most recent predecessor of FCCI is FGCI (Finnish Grid and Cloud Infrastructure), whose special feature was the use of Grid technology. In Grid, computing clusters situated at different locations around Finland were logically combined together. For the Cloud, the joint resources were part of the cPouta cloud provided by CSC.

FGCI

The FGCI project originally started in February 2015. The Academy of Finland participated in its funding through a grant in its FIRI 2014 Infrastructure call. In this manner, FGCI was co-funded by the Academy of Finland and 13 Finnish research institutions: University of Helsinki, Aalto University, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Tampere University of Technology, University of Eastern Finland, University of Jyväskylä, University of Oulu, University of Turku, Åbo Akademi University, National Land Survey of Finland, Finnish Geospatial Research Institute FGI, Helsinki Institute of Physics, Helsinki Institute of Information technology, and CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd.

The FGCI hardware was procured and deployed as a joint effort between the participating institutes and CSC. System administration of the clusters/Grid was taken care of in co-operation between CSC and the university partners.

The FGCI was officially innaugurated on 20.04.2016. On the day of the FGCI inauguration, the total aggregated peak capacity of the infrastructure was about 400 TFlop/s, out of which about 250 TFlop/s was the FGCI capacity and 150 TFlop/s the capacity belonging to FGCI's predecessor, FGI (see below), that was slowly phased out. Out of FGCI's 250 TFlop/s, 218 TFlop/s was linked to Grid capacity (including CPU and GPGPU capacity) and 32 TFlop/s was to Cloud capacity.

FGI

Another predecessor known as FGI (Finnish Grid Infrastructure) was a national distributed computing environment and the National Grid Infrastructure (NGI) for Finland. The total aggregated peak capacity of the infrastructure was 154 TFlop/s, of which 51 TFlop/s was CPU capacity and 103 TFlop/s based on GPGPU capacity.

The project originally started in the winter of 2004, resulting in the M-Grid which was then extended in 2011 to form the FGI. The Academy of Finland participated in the funding through a grant in its FIRI 2010 Infrastructure call. The FGI consisted of CSC and the following nine universities: Aalto University, University of Helsinki, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Tampere University of Technology, University of Eastern Finland, University of Jyväskylä, University of Oulu, University of Turku and Åbo Akademi University.

The FGI hardware procurement was done in 2011 as a joint effort between the participating universities and CSC. System administration of the clusters/Grid was done in co-operation between CSC and the university partners. The FGI was available for researchers in early 2012.