The programme had several goals that were aiming to lower the barriers for collaboration. One of the aims for the programme was that the infrastructure is updated to the level that ensures the international collaboration. Offering a world-class infrastructure is seen as an advantage for Finnish researchers as collaborators in international projects. The goal was also to enable the management of data and computing so that research and innovation can respond to new challenges. Opening CSC's services for governmental research institutes and making the collaboration between organisations in research sector and  private sector easier, has influenced the collaboration.

3.1 Collaboration in education and research sector

Within the CSC user projects the collaboration across the organisations has increased during the past couple of years. Approximately 15% of the projects include partners from more than one organisation (increase to the beginning of 2020, the share being 11%). About 40% of the governmental research institutes' projects include collaboration with other organisation (30% in 2020). About 80% of their collaboration projects are with universities. About 17% of the Finnish universities' projects are collaboration projects and most often with other universities, national or international (about two thirds). In total, about 5% of the projects are collaborations between Finnish higher education or research institution and international institution. It is good to note that the project partners may also have collaborators that relates to the CSC user project but don't need to use the services and are thus not included as project partners. In the user survey conducted in 2020, majority of the respondents thought that CSC's services benefit their collaborations with national research organisations, also across the sectoral borders, and international collaborations (Figure 3.1).

Table 3.1. Collaboration projects for governmental research institutes, universities of applied sciences, and universities. Share in 2/2020 is in brackets. 

Figure 3.1 Significance of CSC's services in users' collaborations. 

We asked: How would you assess the significance of the infrastructure and services offered by CSC in your collaborations. 5= strongly agree, 4= agree, 3= neither agree nor disagree, 2= disagree, 1= strongly  disagree, NA/IDK= Not applicable to my work or tasks/I don't know. N= 377 (144-247 per statement, NA/IDK answers are not included in the figure).

Data source: Survey for CSC's data management and computing services 2020.

The governmental research institutes are increasingly benefitting from CSC's services, and during the past few years also collaboration between CSC and research organisations on other initiatives has increased. Long-term collaboration with VTT has continued in the form of several initiatives that relates to data management and computing. CSC has also broadened its collaboration with VTT in the area of quantum computing. Kvasi, the quantum computing simulator, LUMI pre-exascale supercomputer and the quantum computer that VTT is building together with start-up company IQM, complement each other well and provide an excellent grounds for the collaboration in the area. CSC has also participated in the preparation of the national GAIA-X Hub together with a consortium led by the VTT, and contributes to the collaboration done by the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence by offering computational resources to their research. CSC, as well as VTT, THL and Findata are involved in the preparation of the European Data Spaces framework within the Sitra-led TEHDAS project that aims to create the conditions for a European health data space and promote the secondary use of health data. CSC is also providing information systems solutions to the Social and Health Data Permit Authority Findata. 

The influence of DL2021 programme to international collaboration is not limited only to the collaborations of the users of the services and collaboration of CSC with its national partners. The programme has greatly benefited also CSC's international collaborations as well, an outstanding example being forming a consortium of several countries and attracting LUMI, one of the EuroHPC pre-exascale supercomputers, to Finland. 

3.2 Collaboration with private sector

DL2021 environment and the programme was also to benefit the innovations and responses to new challenges also by the private sector. While there has been initial steps taken on this, the main focus within the private sector use has turned into LUMI. However, DL2021 has played an important role in piloting the use of computing capacity of the companies together with Business Finland.  Business Finland  has an AI Business Program, where an SME or startup can apply for computing time for their research project (i.e. AI Computing Grant). Computing time granted through the programme is free for the companies (value of € 20,000-80,000 ). Computing grants were provided to several companies: Speechly, Neuro Event Labs, Groke Technologies, Inscripta. 

One of the first pilots the Business Finland's program was Speechly's speech recognition project. Speechly specializes in speech interfaces, and for nine months Speechly’s speech recognition technology based on deep neural networks was developed with CSC’s Puhti-AI supercomputer. During the project, Speechly improved the accuracy of its speech recognition model by almost 60% in terms of word error rate. Larger companies and more traditional HPC use, simulations, was not in the scope of AI Business Program, meaning that support covering these might need to be considered in the future.

For more about Speechly and their project, see: 

Computational power and support helping Finnish companies to conquer the world

For more about Business Finland's AI Business Program, see: 

New value from AI and platform economy

In the survey for users of CSC's data management and computing services conducted in 2020, majority of the of the respondents thought that CSC's services benefit their collaborations in the area of research nationally and internationally. Benefits for collaborations with business sector were identified less frequently (Figure 3.1). The efforts to facilitate public-private sector collaboration within CSC's service environment started during the DL2021 programme, whereas collaboration amongst research organisations have been in place for longer time already. As of October 2021 there are about 20 end-user projects with partners from a higher education or research institution and a company. The number is still small but has increased during the past couple of years. It is possible that there are also projects that have collaborators from business sectors without them being partners in the CSC project.

Next chapter:  4. Support and training  for effective use