The story behind DeiC

DeiC in years

DeiC (Danish e-infrastructure Cooperation) was established in 2012 under the Ministry of Higher Education and Science by Act No. 70 of April 19, 2012. DeiC's official name in the document was Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation.

The purpose was to gather the activities within networks and supercomputers that were previously part of Forskningsnettet and DCSC.

The background for the new organization was a strategy prepared in collaboration between the Danish Agency for Higher Education and Science and the universities, which was published in late 2018 "Strategy for National Cooperation on Digital Research Infrastructure", which meant a number of changes in DeiC's mandate and tasks.

The current organization received its legal framework as of 1 July 2023 through Executive Order BEK 217 of 23/05/2023. At the same time, the organization changed its name from Danish e-Infrastructure Cooperation to Danish e-Infrastructure Consortium, but could retain DeiC as the daily name.

DeiC's task is to develop and coordinate collaboration on digital research infrastructure between universities.

The research network

The universities' first IT systems were located in regional computing centers:

• NEUCC (Northern Europe University Computing Center) at DTU in Lyngby from 1965
• RECKU (Regional Computing Center at the University of Copenhagen) from 1970
• RECAU (Regional Computing Center at Aarhus University) from 1971

The three centers were merged into UNI-C in 1985.

From around 1984, the universities had begun to connect their local networks so they could communicate with each other. This was done via bridges: on one side of the bridge, the local network was connected via Ethernet, on the other side there was a hardwired telecommunications line to the other university.

The architecture was gradually expanded with routers using the TCP/IP protocol family. UNI-C thus operated the first large network in Denmark based on the technology used by the Internet. The network, known as DENET, was also connected to the Internet.

Subsequently, the activities were organized under the name Forskningsnettet, which since 2003 has been user-paid via an account in the Danish Finance Act. Until the establishment of DeiC in 2012, Forskningsnettet was administered by a network secretariat under DTU, while operations were outsourced to UNI-C.

Supercomputers

A supercomputer is a computer for scientific calculations that is more powerful than ordinary computers. Based on this loose definition, the first computer at NEUCC can be described as Denmark's first supercomputer. It was an IBM 7090, which upon delivery in July 1965 doubled Denmark's total computing capacity.

The first actual supercomputer under UNI-C auspices was an Amdahl VP1100 vector processor, which was purchased in 1987. Vector processors are specialized computers for fast calculation with many similar operations in each calculation step on long series of numbers (vectors).

UNI-C operated several supercomputers located in Lyngby. Researchers from the universities could access them via Forskningsnettet.

In 2001, DCSC (Danish Center for Scientific Computing) was established. In contrast to UNI-C's centralized organization, DCSC was decentralized: the center distributed funds to establish computing power at the individual universities.

The prevailing technology was now grid computing, where a large number of computers based on standard equipment are connected in a high-speed network. To promote this development, the Danish Center for Grid Computing (DCGC) ran from 2003 to 2007. In 2008, DCSC and DCGC merged.

When DeiC was established, DKK 50 million was transferred from the Danish Finance Act's pool for research infrastructure. This was used to establish DeiC's three national supercomputers.

DeiC's national supercomputers are established at and in collaboration with individual universities and institutions. However, they are available to all researchers at Danish universities and research institutions. In April 2011, the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation published the results of six expert panels' recommendations for the coming years' needs for research infrastructure within different subject areas. The work resulted in a Danish roadmap for research infrastructure.

According to the roadmap, DeiC was to be established as a merger of DCSC and Forskningsnettet. Furthermore, a national competence center was to be established under DeiC to spread awareness of eScience.

During the work to define the framework for DeiC, it was decided that the organization should also take care of research data management.