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Try Fermilab (Department of Energy)
www.fnal.gov

More than 2000 emploees and most of the scintists use Linux as Desktop OS. We even have our own Linux distribution: Fermi Linux

It will take the detectors on the Tevatron beam, CDF and D0, years with full luminosity to collect the statistics for a five-sigma discovery, and only in a very limited range of the Higgs mass (details). (The Higgs mass is unknown, but the latest limits from the LEP Higgs working group suggest that it's heavier that 110 GeV.)

Chances for LHC aren't really that bad. Their luminosity will be way higher than Tevatron's.

That is of course, if the Higgs exists. If not... well, particle physics will have a very interesting time then :)

It will take the detectors on the Tevatron beam, CDF and D0, years with full luminosity to collect the statistics for a five-sigma discovery, and only in a very limited range of the Higgs mass (details). (The Higgs mass is unknown, but the latest limits from the LEP Higgs working group suggest that it's heavier that 110 GeV.)

Chances for LHC aren't really that bad. Their luminosity will be way higher than Tevatron's.

That is of course, if the Higgs exists. If not... well, particle physics will have a very interesting time then :)

It will take the detectors on the Tevatron beam, CDF and D0, years with full luminosity to collect the statistics for a five-sigma discovery, and only in a very limited range of the Higgs mass (details). (The Higgs mass is unknown, but the latest limits from the LEP Higgs working group suggest that it's heavier that 110 GeV.)

Chances for LHC aren't really that bad. Their luminosity will be way higher than Tevatron's.

That is of course, if the Higgs exists. If not... well, particle physics will have a very interesting time then :)

Fermilab already has a Tevatron.

This may be a foreshadow of industrial trends to come with the present economic recession because, for the past 8 years or so, particle physics has been in a major recession of its own. After suffering 20% cutbacks in Department of Energy funding over the last few years, we got a 5% cut last year, and rumors of a 15% cut this year are very threatening.

Other reasons for basic research programs to switch to Linux include security of having the source code, and the way that the free software movement is consistent with the philosophy of our research. Scientists can get very fearful of any software that's not under their control, so having the source code gives a kind of reassurance that their computing platforms won't break in some way that can't be fixed. And also the basic goal is to increase public knowledge, not to create intellectual property. (I sure am glad I don't need to pay royalties to Einstein's great grandsons every time I boost particle trajectories from one reference frame to another, or compute invariant particle masses.) So it makes sense to use, and develop as the need arises, free software whenever it's feasable.

Okay, I'm getting further off topic, so I'll stop.

Just have a look at this image from the construction of the Superkamiokande Neutrino Detector. The photomultiplier tubes ("mushrooms") used there are very much similar to those used for the AMANDA detector. You can see two of the AMANDA sensors here, together with the glass pressure globes they're put in before deployment.

I know this - have been working for the AMANDA group once, when we were calibrating the first PMT's for AMANDA back in 1995. It's done at Desy Zeuthen near Berlin. And we were using Linux boxes in the lab for data aquisition purposes ;-)

The nifty thing about AMANDA aren't the PMT tubes but the pressure globes they are put in (1500m of solid ice do exert some force ...). I've got one of the predecessors (used for the BAIKAL experiment) at home, it's cool telling people at a party that the salad bowl has once been at 1500m depth in Lake Baikal.

By the way, did someone notice that the AMANDA logo is a Penguin ?

Linux at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

While I was there I noticed that the CERN neutrino beam went right down the main street of the nearby town of St. Genis in France and on into the Jura Mountains. I wonder if the townspeople in St. Genis would feel comfortable knowing they were being irradiated, even if they understood the particles wouldn't interact.

Well after living in St. Genis for a summer, I came back to Madison, WI, where the neutrino beam from the MINOS experiment is passing right below us! The beam goes from Fermilab (Batavia, IL) to somewhere in minnesota, and goes right under us in Madison! If anyone has the opportunity to take a tour of the NuTeV experiment at Fermilab, you can walk right through the neutrino beamline, which is kinda fun.

I haven't seen anyone mention the Amanda Experiment, which is just plain cool because it's in Antarctica. They're putting their detector in the antarctic ice, again at a depth of about 2km (they use hot water drills).

--Bob

Particularly nice is the capacity to have many different versions of any given product installed at the same time, each possibly with different dependencies (or dependencies on different versions of a different product). It is not only possible, but convenient for different users to run different versions by default, or even for a user to run different versions of the same program simultaneously, or switch back an forth between different versions. Very handy in a development environment.

Of course, it handles things like dependencies nicely as well. Unfortunatly, the only place I know of that distributes anything using UPS/UPD is Fermilab, and although they do make the UPS/UPD software available, they do not distribute software publicly using it.

Particularly nice is the capacity to have many different versions of any given product installed at the same time, each possibly with different dependencies (or dependencies on different versions of a different product). It is not only possible, but convenient for different users to run different versions by default, or even for a user to run different versions of the same program simultaneously, or switch back an forth between different versions. Very handy in a development environment.

Of course, it handles things like dependencies nicely as well. Unfortunatly, the only place I know of that distributes anything using UPS/UPD is Fermilab, and although they do make the UPS/UPD software available, they do not distribute software publicly using it.

Particularly nice is the capacity to have many different versions of any given product installed at the same time, each possibly with different dependencies (or dependencies on different versions of a different product). It is not only possible, but convenient for different users to run different versions by default, or even for a user to run different versions of the same program simultaneously, or switch back an forth between different versions. Very handy in a development environment.

Of course, it handles things like dependencies nicely as well. Unfortunatly, the only place I know of that distributes anything using UPS/UPD is Fermilab, and although they do make the UPS/UPD software available, they do not distribute software publicly using it.

This makes it extremely hard to do things like "extract page 10", because you have to run the program until it outputs 9 pages, somehow defeating the actual output, wait for it to request output for the 10th time, capture the raster memory, then kill the program.

Let a lower powered accelerator attempt to find the Higgs, I STILL don't believe it will be discovered, because it's been stated over and over 'we just need a little more power to find the Higgs boson!'. The problem is that all of these vast teams are lead by one or two scientists, who desperately want the Nobel Prize. Hence, good science is sometimes ignored in favor of the limelight... I'm just glad 'good physics' prevailed this time around.

I had hoped to talk about this on BottomQuark but lost all my research midway through the discussion. whoops. `8r) I wonder if there is such a thing as an amateur partical physics person....

--
Gonzo Granzeau

For more background information, see links:

Scientific American

Another description

Oh-So-Useful Slashdot Article

Uh, Keyboardist

I just did an "apt-get install nedit"--it looks like a great editor. Thanks!

However, basic research, like everything else is best handled in a market environment. Individuals should be free to fund the basic research they see as the most valuable.

How many would choose to fund Fermilab? What private concern would or could find the money to support Jet Propulsion Laboratory? Don't forget, the government funded the manned lunar landing to which we should thank for our own microcomputer industry.

The list goes on and on and on. First, and foremost it includes the very infrastructure that supports Slashdot and everything else that matters to geeks. Without government funding there would be no Internet.

Pshaw! No matter what your political persuasion, naive extremism is rubbish. This includes libertarianism.

For a thorough popular discussion, see Leon Lederman's book, The God Particle.

For a thorough popular discussion, see Leon Lederman's book, The God Particle.

("His graduate student"? A wee-bit Freudian, don't you think??)

But in a recent ferminews, there was an article about how there may be 4 types of neutrinos - breaking the Standard Model! The article is here, on Fermi's site.

Of course, tcl is also used. Most of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey software is written in Dervish, which is a Fermilab branch of tcl.

If you have other questions about things Lederman mentioned, maybe some of us physics-types can explain further...

I would. In a heartbeat, as long as the price was something I could afford. I find both vi & emacs almost intimidating with their REQUIREMENTS of learning the keyboard shortcuts. I can use vi to edit any file that I mess up and as a result am forced to boot into my system -- but that's the extent of where I use it. I've tried emacs. It's big, it's slow, it's powerful, and it's not for me.

If your looking for a relatively powerful GUI text editor then I would probably recommend NEdit, my editor of choice for larger documents when using X11. Lots of features, including syntax highlighting, programable learn/replay and macros. The next release (scheduled for this month) is under the GPL, previous releases have been under Fermitools license, which is why it isn't in widespread use.

Al.
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this is a bit offtopic and i haven't read the entire article (skimmed it) but i'd like to relate something:

When i was in high school, i attended a saturday morning physics program at fermilab (il) which has a particle accelerator. the program was pretty much a lecture series by researchers there about "basic" concepts, theories, and trends in high-energy physics.

one of topics that was covered is the need for faster accelerators in order to acheive the energy necessary to do the experiment that would verify any unifed theory.

the lecture mentioned that (at the time) fermilab had the fastest accelerator, but the new CERN accelerator (which is active now, i assume) would eclipse it.

now the part i found interesting was the fact that the accelerator at CERN would not be rivaled for a while because the only way to get significantly faster would be to build it larger. on the scale of a few HUNDRED MILES larger.

one of the proposals that the lecturer showed us for a future accelerator would be drilled by robots and would span one or two states!

i couldn't find anything that references this on the site so maybe someone who works there or has more knowledge on this stuff can help me out? please? *grin*

Now, I'm not going to give up Perl, of course, but this would make me just another, slightly happier, perl hacker. Anyone have any leads on something like this?

And to qualify: don't even bother saying emacs. Seriously. No thanks, I already have an operating system. :-)

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We all take pink lemonade for granted.

How many double majors were there for CS/ECE? 1. CS and Mathmatics? 15. What about double majors in CS and Chem? 5. CS and Bio? 6.There was even one guy who in three years managed to pull a CS degree, a Pysch degree and a hard science degree.

The NY-Times article seems to be addressing the problem of the sciences "losing" people to CS, but misses that many of the sciences are gaining many savvy programmers, which have now become essential.

Over the summer I got an internship at Fermilab, a high energy physics institute. What distinguished me from the other 300 or so people who wanted my spot? I could code. Although was involved in physics at Fermi, most of my major contributions were programs.

Some sort of computer science background is absolutely necessary to do physics now days. Reducing hundreds of gigabytes of CP-violation data into a single number is not something you want to do by hand. At Fermilab, computers outnumber the humans. The stereotypical physicist doesn't spend his days behind a blackboard, but rather behind a monitor searching for a correlation in mountains of data.

Scientists should be encouraged to learn Computer Science- not only may it help them with their science, but they might need it to get a job. Half or more of all Ph.D. physicists can't get jobs in physics. We should be happy if CS attracts people away from physics sooner rater than later.

Richard Feynman proposed that anti-matter was not regular matter with opposite charge, but rather regular matter with the "normal" charge that was travel backwards through time. It comes down to whether you put the minus sign on one side of the equation or the other. This can be described via "Feynman Diagrams". http://www-e815.fnal.gov/~bugel/finema n.html provides an over view and mentions the backward time thing at the end of the page.

Because that speed is very different than the speed of the surrounding area and, since gravity falls off so quickly with distance, (Newton is sufficient here) the fact that the particles in question are moving so quickly is amazing.

Re: No big deal... Havent they goten particals up to 10% the speed of light before in mass accelerators.

I don't know the term mass accelerator, but if you mean particle accelerator then yes, they have gone faster than 10%. Much. The percentage of the speed isn't really important at the level of most detectors but it is more than 99.99%. What is measured is the energy of the accelerator, which for Fermilab is ~2TeV and in the future CERN will run at ~7TeV. See either site for great intros to high energy physics pages.

BTW, I saw another poster mention 1 Tb of data a second. Realize that there are 3 levels of "triggers" designed to isolate interesting events (1 event = 1 proton-antiproton collision). All 1 Tb doesn't reach the computing cluster (The 2000 nodes are probably the Level 3 trigger system and/or batch reconstruction). From my brief perusal of Fermilab's Farms page it seems that they will use several I/O PC's connected via fast or gigabit ethernet to a gigabit ethernet switch, which will be connected to the farm. The switch will also be connected to the cental mass storage system.

-- Bob

You can search for yourself at www.fnal.gov.

This makes a lot of sence considering how much Fermilab does with Linux. Check out The article on Linux on page 10. The article refers to their Computing Division's policy on Linux. Which I think is really well thought out. I wish more large, distributed, organizations would put some sort of policy like this in place rather than trying to ignore Linux and then whine about it when there's a problem.

This makes a lot of sence considering how much Fermilab does with Linux. Check out The article on Linux on page 10. The article refers to their Computing Division's policy on Linux. Which I think is really well thought out. I wish more large, distributed, organizations would put some sort of policy like this in place rather than trying to ignore Linux and then whine about it when there's a problem.

Fermilab is also using clusters of Linux PCs (farms) for data analysis and reconstruction in the upcoming Run II,and, for instance, for the CDF experiment's Level 3 trigger system.

Fermilab is also using clusters of Linux PCs (farms) for data analysis and reconstruction in the upcoming Run II,and, for instance, for the CDF experiment's Level 3 trigger system.

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/visitor_info.html

For syntax highlighting and other niceties, I'm pretty much hooked on NEdit ( http://fnpspa.fnal.gov/nirvana/nedit.html ). I haven't found an IDE I'm crazy about yet in either Windos or Linux. Anyone have any suggestions?

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