Petri Kutvonen

Retired Information Technology Manager and Head of the Computing Facilities Group · Department of Computer Science* · Faculty of Science* and Process Manager of the IT for Science Group · University of Helsinki* · Helsinki · Finland

Short CV

I have been working for the University of Helsinki since 1975 until 2019 (43 years, 9 months). I have worked in various positions, but most of the time, I have been in charge of the computing facilities of the Department of Computer Science. I have also been involved in the administration of the University of Helsinki on various levels.

My goal has always been to provide computer science researchers, teachers, and students with the best possible tools — both software and hardware — to accomplish their tasks.

With my late friend Ilkka Hai­kala, we accomplished numerous interesting projects, including

• a graphical LISP-system (LISP-G) for the DEC PDP-15 written mainly in FORTRAN IV
• a text processing system called REPORT/EDIT which was used to produce many documents and theses at the department
• creation of the university's first online exercise and exam accounting system CI­SARS
• enhancement of a B6500/­B6700/­B7800 system simulator to enable it to run many major Burroughs large systems software and instrumented it to collect memory reference strings, which led to many studies of program behaviour in memory hierarchies 1978–1988
• the design and implementation of the operating system MOPO for the NOKIA MIKKO 3 minicomputers in 1980–1984, this was a major achievement completed with the help of numerous student projects.

Some other interesting events during my career include

• participation in the introduction of the Internet to Finland in 1987–1988
• operating one of the first DNS name servers in Finland which continued to function as a root server for the FI domain for over 20 years (and during the early years after the restoration of independence of Lithuania also as a root for the LT domain)
• acquisition of our first larger own  server  for the Department of Computer Science,  Ether­net, and an archipelago of SUN workstations in 1988
• witnessing the early years of Linux kernel development
• “supervision” and grading of Linus Torvalds's master's thesis Linux - a Portable Operating System (pdf) in 1996
• the transition from the SunOS UNIX environment to Linux and the introduction of three departmental Linux distributions (CSL1, CSL2, and CUBBLI) during the years 1995–2008
• the “Laptop for every New Student” project, started 2008 with simple netbooks (running Linux), and for computer science students only but has since been expanded to gather the entire Faculty of Science offering high-quality business laptops
• the acquisition and deployment of the departmental super­computer clusters UKKO in 2009–2010 and UKKO 2.0 in 2016–2017.

I was awarded as Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland* by the Finnish president Sauli Nii­nistö on 6 December 2012.

I am married to Lea Kutvonen*, and we have one daughter.