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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.
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. "
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!
Not to mention Scientific Linux (which was frankly unusable it was so out of date until CERN took over)
I can't comment on the rest of what is written here, but this statement in particular is definitely a false statement. CERN did not take over this project. Scientific Linux remains a collaboration between the two labs. See:
SL is a Linux release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities around the world. Its primary purpose is to reduce duplicated effort of the labs, and to have a common install base for the various experimenters. -From http://www.scientificlinux.org/
If you click on the "about" page, you'll see that there are two "main" developers from Fermilab, two from CERN, one from DESY, and one from ETHZ.
what a bullshit fairy tale. Various clusters were built of SGI, IBM workstations and DEC vaxstations. There were CADD/CAE groups who liked SGI machine (and others who used PCs and others with Sun) and some of those had SGI servers,. Until 1995, "the mainframe" for physics use outside of the clusters was an Amdahl, IBM mainframe clone on steroids (actually won over competing supercomputer bids!). First PC farm with dual pentium iii at 333MHz was in 1998. I was there.
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