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."

Comments

The Only Newsworthy Item

[eldavojohn]

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?

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 ... but it's the de facto standard where I work when you need serious shit done -- large or small.

Re:The Only Newsworthy Item

[oakgrove]

The LHC is probably the most important scientific installation on the face of the earth right now with international backing. Do you really think that they would blink at the price tag of Windows anything else if they wanted to use it? They use Linux because for their purposes it is better. Does anybody on this site engage brain before keyboard anymore?

Re:The Only Newsworthy Item

[oakgrove]

The LHC experienced a two year delay from 2005 to 2007 due to budget issues

Yeah, and those budgetary issues had a lot more zeroes behind them than some Windows licenses would have. The price of proprietary OSs on every computer at CERN would be a rounding error compared to the overall cost of the project.

Re:The Only Newsworthy Item

[jc42]

What would they be using if Linux didn't exist? How much longer would it have taken if they'd had to use BSD? Or Windows?

Good points. One of my favorite ways of explaining it to non-geeks is to mention a job I had in the early 1990s, at a company that was building software that ran on either Sun or Apollo workstations, depending on the group. There were ongoing discussions between these two factions, mostly based on the fact that the Suns cost roughly twice what the Apollos did, for similar hardware capabilities. But the teams using Suns generally won out, for a simple reason: When the Apollo users had serious bugs that led down to the OS and "system" libraries, queries to Apollo CS typically got the reply "We can't tell you; it's proprietary."

OTOH, when the Sun users had bugs that led down into the OS, they'd ask about it on various public forums (mailing lists and newsgroups), and most of the time they'd get an answer from someone inside Sun. Quite often the Sun engineer would simply post the code that dealt with the question, and say "This is exactly how it works".

The result was that the teams using the expensive Sun got their stuff to market quickly, while the Apollo users were still beating their heads against the wall of "proprietary". Stuff that works sells a lot better that stuff that can't be made to work.

Apollo has long since disappeared from view. With time, Sun slowly went the proprietary route, and I haven't used it for over a decade. It wasn't much of a surprise when they got gobbled up by one of the most rapacious corporations in the industry. But this didn't matter, because those of us interested in rapid software development had long since migrated over to Linux or *BSD, for exactly the same reason that we'd used Sun workstations a decade or so earlier. Nowadays, google can typically find you the code that implements whatever error messages you're getting on those systems. With all of google's problems, this is orders of magnitude faster than solving problems on proprietary systems. And stuff that works still sells better than stuff that can't be made to work.

It's no surprise that "aware" non-geeks like Apple's stuff. It's shiny. And some geeks are still using it, though we're drifting away as Apple moves back into its walled garden. But if you're part of the tech crowd, which pretty much included all real scientists and engineers, it make a lot of sense to use the most open computer systems you can get your hands on. These days, the poster child for openness is linux, so you are probably using that.

Still, there are systems like OpenBSD and FreeBSD (and iTron ;-) that are also quite open. Probably not soon, but some day, it's quite possible that some gang of professional managers and legal types will manage to capture Linux and take it proprietary. We should be looking over our shoulders for such corporate IP raiders, and be prepared for abandoning ship for whatever has managed to remain open. Or, more likely, the linux gang may bog down in the complexity of their attempts to steal "the desktop" from MS, and make their stuff more and more difficult to use. When this happens, we should know what our alternatives are, if we want computer systems that are easily usable in technical arenas.

Re:The Only Newsworthy Item

[rubycodez]

GNU/Linux is not a Unix(tm), but those of us older than Unix and Unix(tm) know it is a unix

Linux is indeed used in many scientific fields

[Kensai7]

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.

Vital?

[Missing.Matter]

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.

Re:Vital?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been noted by others (in the article, for example) that Linux is the undisputed king of high-performance computing, in the public sector at least. My only assumption is that that is not random, that there are reasons for it.

As far as other open source solutions BSD kernels generally do not have such good support for hard real time applications.

I have seen a lot of posts by you on this site and Engadget. You put down open source solutions and champion MS almost always. You also tend to almost always use populist ignorant style rhetoric. Consider the possibility that the internet would be a better place if you would just shut up and listen for a while.

Re:The Little Platform That Could

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Microsoft did more

[ThorGod]

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.

Solaris

[anyaristow]

Scientific installations used to use Solaris a lot. Linux isn't better. It's just cheaper.

Re:Kitchen staff

[Anonymous Coward]

"Transcendence"? So that's how heart attack is called nowadays?

Ubuntu?

[scheme]

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?

Aren't We Past This?

[detain]

Didn't we already prove linux has a place in the world? Why are we still getting these stories still trying to validate linux.