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How the Tevatron Influenced Computing
New submitter SciComGeek writes "Few laypeople think of computing innovation in connection with the Tevatron particle accelerator, which shut down earlier this year. Mention of the Tevatron inspires images of majestic machinery, or thoughts of immense energies and groundbreaking physics research, not circuit boards, hardware, networks, and software. Yet over the course of more than three decades of planning and operation, a tremendous amount of computing innovation was necessary to keep the data flowing and physics results coming. Those innovations will continue to influence scientific computing and data analysis for years to come."
And the web was created at CERN. Enough said.
... where people need something new to fix a problem.
It will never really happen at places where people want to make a quick buck with it.
Fermi Linux enjoyed limited adoption outside of Fermilab, until 2003, when Red Hat Linux ceased to be open source.
A typo?
I got the mini tour at Lawrence Livermore National Lab a few years back. They've spent about three billion dollars on a proof of concept system for hot fusion. During the project, they invented a process to extrude entire sheets of solid ruby crystals, and hundreds of other innovations. Yes, three billion dollars is a lot of money. The things they had to create will reverberate throughout the private sector for decades, however, and they plan on selling off the final hot fusion plans to private companies who will profit from it once they've got all the kinks worked out.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
One of the National Labs was using a parallel array of fast tape, I think LTO, to get decent speed (1 GBPS or so) and decent capacity (10TB). Good for recording all the data from one experiment.
In medicine, one of the offshots from CERN & the LHC has been the development/improvement of the MRI scanner.
I'll rattle off a half dozen from the top of my head:
According to Robert Young, one of the founders of Red Hat, Fermilab's adoption of Linux was one of the seminal events in the acceptance of Linux as a real operating system.
IBM's SP series of computers was inspired by the IBM RS6000 compute farms at Fermilab.
The original Linux CD driver was written by an experimenter at the DZero group at Fermilab.
Many parallel programming techniques were pioneered on the ACP/MAPS system designed, engineered, and built at Fermilab.
The term "compute farm" was coined at Fermilab.
Fermilab was the world's third web site, after CERN and SLAC.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Regardless of your definition of a "the first computer", I'm sure just about anyone can find their own definition of it here. And I don't think that definition will be after the work of going to the moon started.
so it's not like that the site will be fully shutdown.
Odd that people don't think of Illinois when they think of computing and physics.
I do.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you.
Great article. Well written, interesting and informative. Once more we are reminded that It's All About The Software.
"Crude and slow, clansman. Your attack was no better than that of a clumsy child."
What the hardware used for LHC is going to spawn. High speed networking, storage arrays, things of that nature are going to be interesting.
My understanding is the the LHC currently involves a worldwide computing grid capable of distributing on the order of a petabyte of data a month, and doing basic analysis of much more. The thing is that the people who work at such places are highly intelligent problem solvers that are not going to throw out ideas simply because it does not meet some preconceived notion. They are not going to say don't paint the roof white simply because no one has done it before. They have problems to solve, and know how to get the funding to do it.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Sounds like a Transformer, probably a Decepticon.
Wrong. The first electronic computer (discounting the secret British one -- if it's secret, for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist) was ENIAC, patented in 1946, a quarter century before Apollo 11 and six years before I was born.
I hope you're still in junior high, because if not your teachers REALLY suck.
Free Martian Whores!
Few laypeople know what the tevatron is let alone FNAL.
uh, wrong. Zerox and IBM.
Wrong. The first electronic computer (discounting the secret British one -- if it's secret, for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist) was ENIAC, patented in 1946, a quarter century before Apollo 11 and six years before I was born.
I hope you're still in junior high, because if not your teachers REALLY suck.
Wrong, the first programmable computer was Konrad Zuse's Z1, built between 1935 and 1938 (or his Z3, which was the first "Turing complete" computer in 1941). Time to retire, mcgrew :)
And the web was created at CERN.
Not to mention Scientific Linux (which was frankly unusable it was so out of date until CERN took over) and ROOT and a whole host of other particle physics computing applications. In fact the whole article is the most rose-tinted, inaccurate view of Fermilab computing I have ever seen - perhaps they should have talked to some of the users of that computing on the experiments. Rather than leading the charge into Linux computing farms Fermilab had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from their large monolithic mainframe-like SGI machines. The D0 experiment only managed to escape when they clustered their desktop linux machines and produced an analysis cluster with more CPU power than the SGI mainframe Fermilab expected them to use...and even then rather than admit they were going in the wrong direction Fermilab management tried to shut the cluster down using computer security arguments. This despite the rather amazing fact that the only Linux machines which were ever compromised were those not part of the analysis cluster and which Fermilab computing was responsible for managing!
SAM was even more of a joke. It would rarely ever manage to get all your datafiles without multiple attempts and it hid the relevant error messages in log files which required root-level access to read. In addition it had configuration parameters hard-coded and compiled into some of its C++ code which made portability exceedingly hard - not a good design for a distributed computing tool! However the SAM team were always exceedingly good at selling their project so the upper management were always impressed by it - the sad reality was though that it was barely (if at all) capable of delivering on those promises and had the upper management actually been using the thing I doubt they would have been even half as impressed!
All that being said the FNAL computing division had a lot of very competent and talented people working in it. Unfortunately they were kept from actually improving things by a computer security group that used fear and intimidation to keep them in line (like the SS but called the CS!). This "security" group refused to implement a firewall, SSH etc. and, instead, had a detailed _written_ policy about what users could and could not do which they enforced in an arbitrary fashion, threatening to fire people if they did not do as they were told.
I believe things have now improved somewhat and computer security now has more sane and competent people in charge of it but frankly, at the height of the Tevatron, Fermilab computing was anything but innovative and leading the way - they were dragging their heels and were far more of an obstacle than an asset. They were literally forced to improve by the experiments - albeit with the tacit approval and behind the scenes encouragement and help of many of their computing staff who were fed up with the way things were being run.
Best job (all things considered) that I ever had. I got to participate at a pretty deep level in the construction of what was (for a few weeks at least, until it was overtaken by other systems) the fastest supercomputer on the planet; learned a lot about computing in general; and made a number of professional connections that persist to this day (I currently share an office with the same guy I shared an office with when I worked at Fermilab).
So why did I leave, you ask? Multiple reasons: Money (if you were there long enough you tended to fall behind the curve on compensation); glass ceiling (I only have a bachelor's degree); and a division reorg that put me under a total putz of a department head (even the best places to work will have one of these occasionally). Overall, I don't regret leaving; it was the right career move for me at the time. But there are definitely aspects of that job I still miss.
Anyone remember that old DHL TV add where there is the Euro-ish delivery man leaning against his hand truck thinking to himself, "I am bored today... the bourgeoisie businessmen and their PACKAGES!" I can't find that old AD anywhere on youtube. Anyone know where I can find this old ad. It cracks me up.
That sums up Space Nutters quite nicely. Good to see there are still some rational people on slashdot, and it's not a giant circle jerk of delusional space cadets who ACTUALLY believe what I wrote up there.
The web is generally what we refer to HTML based pages as. The Internet is generally what we use as a catch all for various technologies like FTP, HTML, Torrents, IRC, whatever. That particular markup language that we now consider the web was created at CERN. Perhaps you are confusing terminology.
was a great product that came out of Fermilab, iirc. Unfortunately, it didn't keep pace ... not much demand for a motif (lesstif) editor these days. But for those of us who used Sun or HP desktops, and wanted something prettier (less modal) than emacs ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEdit
I worked at the Tagged Photon Lab - that's my PhD advisor Don Summers loading tapes into the Great Wall of drives. We drove the poor folks at Exabyte nuts.
Eric Aitala
Eric Aitala
www.f1m.com
It is not enough that you have to turn every topic to space, you have to start faking posts from the people you claim are haunting you. And yet you're the one calling people delusional nutters in a circle jerk.
HTML is based almost entirely on SGML, which was invented in 1969 at IBM, 20 years before the supposed 'invention' of HTML at CERN. Perhaps you should learn some history.
So you believe computers where invented by NASA? Because that's not something I'm making up here. Space Nutters fervently believe it.
You keep thinking that, and I'm sure it will help you communicate who is a nutter.