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Linux Played a Vital Role In Discovery of Higgs Boson
An anonymous reader writes "Scientific Linux and Ubuntu had a vital role in the discovery of the new boson at CERN. Linux systems are used every day in their analysis, together with hosts of open software, such as ROOT. Linux plays a major role in the running of their networks of computers (in the grid etc.) and it is used for the intensive work in their calculations."
Yup, C++ too. They couldn't make it out of thin air -- now everybody wants a bit of success.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
The only thing that would be newsworthy is if you managed to do something highly technical without having Linux play a vital role. For everyone who thinks that a complete absence of Linux is the norm: Did you use the internet?
... but it's the de facto standard where I work when you need serious shit done -- large or small.
After tinkering with Debian on my Raspberry Pis, it's pretty clear that kids are going to learn how pervasive Linux can be. As long as other operating systems are closed source or require money to run, Linux will be more than abundant. I worked at a Fortune 500 company and aside from some hilariously painful Sharepoint servers, everything was Linux. If OSX is Uranium on the periodic table, Linux is Hydrogen. If Windows is as abundant and costly as diamonds, Linux is as abundant and costly as carbon. It may be no-frills, it might be forever doomed to be passed over by gamers and musicians
My work here is dung.
Wow, Imagine what they would discover with a Bewoulf Cluster then...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
When I talk about Free I talk about being able to dive in the kernel to find backdoors. BANG.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
They probably would had still found it.
I would also like thank Expo Dry Erase markets, without them we wouldn't get our first draft of the calculations.
The Vital Role is technology that without it, it wouldn't happen. Not something without it, you would have a perfectly usable substitute.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Linux is indeed used in many scientific fields. Speed? Customization? Open source tools? Probably all the above. If anyone is working on Neuroscience, for example, I bet he/she already knows NeuroDebian or will be interested to use it.
"Sum Ergo Cogito"
What are you talking about? "Donated to the project"? There were no donations, these were research grants and funds from various national governments.
Ezekiel 23:20
And by the way, ROOT was developed by CERN, so what's exactly the point there?
I'm missing the news part somewhere...
Smells like.... a shameless plug.
Yup, C++ too. They couldn't make it out of thin air -- now everybody wants a bit of success.
Let's not forget THE most important members of the team: the folks who made the coffee! NOTHING helps more with analysis than fresh pots and pots of coffee!
C++ and Linux - pffft! Gimme enough coffee and all I need is an abacus, some graph paper and colored pencils!
Well Linux has to, if they ran Windows they would only discover the blue screen. Linux has the stability, the performance and the design that make it the ideal candidate for the scientific environment.
couldn't have done it without the desks
and Euclid as well, but that really doesn't have anything to do with the fact that these people found the Higgs Boson with the power of their invariably large brains. The tools may have been important, but you and I have Linux and we didn't do it, so let's leave the credit where it really belongs.
http://www.lhc.gov.uk/Frameworks-Directory/Aluminium-Windows-Doors-A5/
what?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A Kernel that was provided by someone else.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
oxygen played a vital role in the discovery of the new boson at CERN. Oxygen plays a major role in the running of their brains. Finally the world will take oxygen seriously as a means to move humanity forward.
What is a research grant but a donation from the people that actually make money and provide a real service to the world?
The only truly vital piece of equipment involved was the LHC, which created the necessary energy levels to find something like the Higgs Boson. Everything else seems like interchangeable tools: if it wasn't one operating system it would be another, if it wasn't one open source solution, it would be another maybe even closed source solution.
the cafeteria staff, without them, we wouldn't have ate
Heh, I wonder if service people would put that on their resume?
Janitorial staff when Higgs was found.
Turned out he was on holiday leaving magnum to fend for himself.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...and you'll find god.
Am I interpreting that right?
Once you get outside of editing msword documents, Linux is pretty much useful to everyone, everywhere. If you think that Linux isn't useful, you're wearing your consumer blinders a little too tight.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Naw, I think Microsoft's biggest contribution to all this was the Comic Sans font.
By the same line of reasoning, you could argue that COBOL tax software run by IRS and equivalent bodies in European countries was a key component in finding the Higgs boson. And the baker on the street corner was a key component as well because he made the scientists happier in the morning and therefore more productive. You have to draw the line somewhere as to what is a part of the project and what isn't.
Ezekiel 23:20
He also says "In terms of data analysis, Windows could be used in principle. We could also use some type of device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a simple table of rules." and "I work primarily in physics, not in computing, so I doubt that I am able to argue very competently for Linux over something such as BSD." but then goes on to conclude Linux is "vital" even though it's on principle interchangeable with these other platforms.
Anything except for BSD would have been considerably more expensive, possibly prohibitively so.
Yes. Sometimes the availability of tools that don't actually break your budget is a relevant and meaningful thing. Most of us don't have drawers full of cash.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
So what if Linux played a role in their server operations. Microsoft was used in all the ways that made the money donated to the project. So once again Linux users talk about "free" when they really mean "provided for by someone else."
Overly broad connection is bizarre. You see, in the academic world professors tend to use the best tool available or make a better tool. The LHC is a good example of that, since it simply didn't exist until a group of academics turned their efforts to creating it. I guarantee LHC researchers have refined and contributed back to many OSS projects. If anything, Linux and BSD thrive off of contributions made by researchers (academic and otherwise). It would be more noteworthy if Linux played a minimal role at a scientific project like the LHC.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
So that's why it took them so long to find the Higgs Boson. They had to 'see' it.
If they'd had a properly working audio stack, they would have been able to hear it years ago...
There's no place like
Computers played a major role in the discovery of the Higgs boson.
I hear electricity played a pretty important role, too.
So how was Linux vital and BSD not?
Oh, I guess it does. Never mind.
About as much as vital as the toilet paper in the labs' toilets. Don't know the brand right now, but the experiment wouldn't have been possible without it undoubtfully.
MISTER POTATO HEAD. Backdoors are not secrets!
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
If Linux is so great, then why aren't they selling it for super cheap to poor people, like Microsoft is with Windows? Do they think we're made of money or something?
Scientific installations used to use Solaris a lot. Linux isn't better. It's just cheaper.
Can you make a valid argument to why those other OS's are better? Obviously the geniuses at CERN feel otherwise. But, I'm sure you are much smarter than they are and just need to go and set them straight. Fucking delusional fanboy that you are.
Linux supports hardware that BSD doesn't and performs better in hard realtime applications. This is common knowledge amongst people that actually work in this field.
The point is not that they used Linux, or Windows, or BSD or OSX or any other OS. The point is that a group of people joined together with a goal, selected the appropriate tools for whichever task it is they were working on, and employed them. A collective union was able to transcend the barrier of the "OS Argument" and just get things done. I more admire a network that has a cohabitation of multiple Operating Systems, working together - than a single OS focused environment. There is no telling what other discoveries could be made if people could get past the OS argument, and learn to use whichever tool makes THEM more productive. =D
Wait, where does Ubuntu come in? CMS and ATLAS are standardized on SL5/6 and I'm guessing LHCb and ALICE are also using SL. Who's using Ubuntu?
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
I'd mod you funny if I could.
Are responsible for my college education, because they helped me walk to class.
This reminds me I of a comic I saw years ago that was at the expense of Mac users. I believe the comic was even related to CERN and pictured a bunch of mac users in a coffee shop. Has anybody else seen it, know where it can be found on the interweb?
The Turing Machine reference is remarkably astute for someone outside the specialty.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're confusing taxes with greed.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Come on, everyone knows that taxes destroy wealth. They don't create it. Try to troll harder next time.
Yea, why do you think America was so poor during the 1950's, when the top tax rate was 90%?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Naw, I think Microsoft's biggest contribution to all this was the Comic Sans font.
LOL +1
Here's your awesomeness car sir... what a perfect synthesis.
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
Actually, the article addresses that. Or at the very least, the author says "dammit, Jim, I'm a particle physicist not a computer scientist! I don't know why they picked Linux over BSD!"
Most likely, Linux was just something the admins had more experience with, although technical matters probably played a minor role as well.
Eh? Linux edits MS Word documents well with Libreoffice. The really weak areas are games, and a huge number of specialized apps from web and graphics development. Most Linux tools really cannot match the Adobe stuff.
I hope people appreciate the gravity of that statement.
Linux is not a real-time operating system. Neither is Windows, Mac OS X or a BSD.
I would argue the opposite, actually. Most Adobe stuff just simply cannot keep up with Linux.
Why would they even try when the end product comes out like garbage anyways? I'm looking at you Flash.
The killer here is the guy on top who says, we need to keep windows because that is all Microsoft Publisher will work with. And, of course, the only reason we use publisher is because "the only alternative [indesign] costs hundreds of dollars a person."
So I think it is too easy to say there is really any ONE reason people don't switch.
Nobody said it was. The point is that it is closer than the competition. Add that fact to its superior hardware support over BSD and its a shoe-in.
Pix, or it didn't happen.
Obvious troll is obvious.
Guys, for the good of the internet don't respond to these kinds of posts.
> On the computational side, BSD, Windows, Aix, Irix, Solaris could have all done exactly the same thing.
In theory yes, in practice, no. As a former astrophysicist we used to use Linux and Solaris for our computing despite the fact that most of the non-computing competent people used Windows on their desktops. The reason we used Linux is that it is a vastly superior development environment than Windows (Visual Studio was not useful for our purposes) and is also vastly superior (that is, easier and more open to us) for hardware integration than Windows. We also were producing and analyzing huge amounts of data, so were using 64-bit Linux while Windows users were still figuring out how to get their 16-bit legacy apps working on their 32-bit systems.
We also wanted uptimes of months whereas with Windows of the time you crossed your fingers that you'd go a day without some kind of fault happening. I'm sure fellow scientists at CERN developed a lot of software themselves and also found Linux far better for this purpose. That is why techie people prefer Linux over Windows - for practical reasons rather than 'religion' as you suppose. The reason you fail to understand this is probably because you are not trying to develop software for 'big data' problems. That's ok, please just understand that this colors your personal view with an inaccurate picture. Best to keep quiet about stuff you know nothing about.
If Microsoft had been involved they would have discovered the Zune boson, the particle that mediates pogo dancing.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I have to bring it to the open: Scientific Linux sucks!
At least on the desktop.
It's so ancient, but then... also super stable. And that is crucial for all our online and offline computing needs.
Don't we all (at CERN) still have some SLC4, even SLC3, systems around? Upgrades are so painful, especially when hardware is in the game...
If the headline was "Apple Played a Vital Role In Discovery of Higgs Boson" just imagine the uproar here.
You still don't address how any of the favors of unix couldn't have done the same thing though.
This article triumphs Linux like it was a factor in the discovery. It wasn't even a remote one.
Yes, I gave it to him and he knows where I live.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Scalability.
Dingdingding! I promise I won't troll next time, guys. Thanks for playing!
Ha no, OS X is UNIX® which is just worthless branding. You pay your money, you get your brand. For enough money Ferrari would put their badge on a mid-range family saloon car.
Linux isn't about branding. With Linux you get no badge, but it goes around the 'ring in under seven minutes. Doesn't need a badge, everybody who matters knows what it is and why they need it.
You see, in the academic world professors tend to use the best tool available or make a better tool.
No they don't. They use what they know and won't learn anything else. I had to beat my thesis advisor over the head with a stick every time he asked for data in a text file.
Didn't we already prove linux has a place in the world? Why are we still getting these stories still trying to validate linux.
http://interserver.net/
Brush up on your hardware. The latest generation x86_64 supercomputing grids have much faster IO and memory bandwidth that the latest generation SPARC boxes/grids have.
SPARC is just as suitable for realtime as x86_64. true realtime is in the programming, not the IO. Counting cyles for every operation you program to make sure you know where each bit is at any cycle during the running of your program is true "real time". Practical "realtime", like what you are talking about is something completely different. That works because your load never exceeds your systems limitations and is just a matter of sufficient overkill on your hardware selection and carefully disabling every cron job that gets in the way of your limits. That too can be done on any machine and has nothing to do with SPARC or not.
Last but not least, only the sampling of the data for the LHC is "real time", the calculations are done later.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
As a former astrophysicist we used to use Linux and Solaris for our computing...
As a current astrophysicist, we still have Solaris on a few legacy systems, but otherwise use Linux more-or-less uniformly.
I don't even run X as root.
-- Seq
It really depends on what you're trying to accomplish. Generally speaking, I agree that Linux is incredibly useful. I don't think I need to explain why here ;)
But it's not really accurate to say that it's great for 'everything except word documents'. I would argue that it's a lot more useful for editing word documents than it is, to give one example of a "serious" endeavor, for audio work. The state of pro audio software on Linux is just plain sad, it's really not suitable for anything beyond hobby projects.
I got worried there for a moment. I almost thought you weren't going to be condescending, self-righteous, or pedantic. Rest assured, your actual point has been lost because you've completely offended your audience.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
To be fair, our economy benefited greatly from the devastation of Europe during WWII. High taxes are not so much of a problem when you are the world leader in manufacturing.
That said, I am of the opinion that we've gone too far. While Reagan's tax cuts were arguably a boon to the economy, we have seen no benefits from the cuts that followed in the 90s and later.
Others have commented on just how widespread Linux really is these days, but that overlooks another reason why this is not news: CERN has been active in the Linux community since the '90s! I remember running into CERN scientists over here to talk about their use of Linux at Linuxworld around '98 or so. Back then, they were basically rolling their own in-house distro, but I'm not surprised to hear they're using Scientific Linux now. Five'll getcha ten that they've had a hand in the development of Scientific Linux. Indeed, if you go to https://www.scientificlinux.org/ you'll see, right at the top of the page: "SL is a Linux Release put together by Fermilab, CERN, and various other labs and universities..." So, they're using the Linux they helped develop! Boy, there's some shocking news!
One of the most insightful comments on this story. Seems like half the Linux community has a massive collective inferiority complex and the other half a laughably unjustifiable superiority complex.
A statistician would say "on the average, then, Linux fanatics are quite normal and well-adjusted".
Shameless plug for a friend who created this shirt: http://www.threadless.com/submission/436738/You_re_just_not_my_type/from,cococosy
A Higgs boson and a graviton are different things. At least because a graviton is expected to have no mass.
Good thing they got it done before 1 July. Darn leap second....
I like how you ask me to make a valid argument, then turn around and make one that is not at all valid yourself. See: appeal to authority. Not to be outdone you follow up with a nice ad hominem.
It's not that those other operating systems are better. They might not be. Linux might be the best. It's the idea that Linux was vital, that without Linux, there would be no discovery.
I was exploring sci-linux' site and they had the "limitation page"
https://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/6x/62/limitations
Well ... it's blank !!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The LHC does use Windows too. To have been there I can say that the LHC control room is filled with computers running Windows. Of course the intensive calculations are made in back rooms filled with 100's of servers running Linux.
This is definitely...
<SunGlasses>
Massive.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
While Scientific Linux, Centos and RHEL are pervasive in World Large Hardon Collider computing grid (WLCG) and on the local computing clusters involved in LHC computing, Ubuntu isn't.
Full stop.
Ubuntu should get over itself and get back to actually supporting it's users as opposed to shipping half baked software (for example they shipped an early development release of abiword) from debian testing then not updating it even though it's full of bugs and upstream fixes them.
Debian-testing ships development software but it also updates it. This is fine. It is what it says it is. Ubuntu doesn't update, so why ship Debian-testing packages?
From this comment I assume you've never worked in academia; in my experience the most commonly used tool is that which works just well enough to get the data ready for the next paper, despite the quality of that tool. I've seen plenty of 1000+ line csh scripts calling IDL routines to get stuff processed, and there's not much hope of getting it replaced since that big task doesn't directly contribute towards the next paper or grant.
I thought this was going to be an article about how searching for Linux on the Desktop marketshare trained scientists to find incredibly small, hard to detect, theoretically plausible, yet observationally uncomfirmed things.
I win - it's THAT simple... lol!
APK
P.S.=> Of that ENTIRE POST, I'd say my link to Windows own High Performance Compute Clustering was what they didn't want shown... apk
Then, I win - it's THAT simple... lol!
APK
P.S.=> Of that ENTIRE POST, I'd say my link to Windows own High Performance Compute Clustering was what they didn't want shown... apk
If you are going to start lauding things that were in the room when the Higgs Boson was found, then Hanes underwear and Red Bull could be also credited with helping in the discovery too.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I caught on early and have been using Scientific Linux for years now. In fact my Internet server has been running on it for years without any serious trouble. I can see that it was a big win for the scientists as the computing budget goes much further if you can build up "Workstation" class machines out of commodity hardware, without the expense and troubles that go along with MS Windows. The work that scientists want to do is more about number crunching and less about Microsoft proprietary software development, Visual Studio, the Windows API, and their latest beta. The availability of open source statistical packages and GNU development software, as well as CUDA compliant video boards hosted on Linux, all operate to the benefit of the projects. It is important to give some credit to Red Hat as well for their willingness to provide their distribution in open source form.
You racist prick. :P
GNU/Linux is a very well-known choice for researchers and scientists for its enormous community of supporters, the documentations it has in different aspects of software engineering, the flexibility of hardware support in different architectures, and for the availability of tools in order to reach a particular goal. Whatever the tools those scientists from different fields use, we thank them for their hard efforts of accomplishments.
I've seen plenty of 1000+ line csh scripts calling IDL routines to get stuff processed, and there's not much hope of getting it replaced since that big task doesn't directly contribute towards the next paper or grant.
Well, academics are people and suffer from the relevant frailties. Like making statements below the belt and sticking to tools that were great at one point in time.
Though, I don't have any experience with IDL. Maybe it's a fine tool.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.