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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
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dingdingding! I promise I won't troll next time, guys. Thanks for playing!
It's in Europe, they don't use toilet paper. True story.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
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?
I don't even run X as root.
-- Seq
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!
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.
we then salute the bidet, and its enabling effect on the morale of clean-assed boffins
Nice sig! All I did is point out the experience of myself and my fellow scientists and why we chose to use Linux over Windows, and the reasons why we considered it a better choice for our purposes. However, it was you who chose to interpret this defensively and in a particular way. I cannot help you with that I'm afraid. My goal was not to offend anyone - it was to help the open-minded understand why scientists choose Linux, since I have direct personal experience with this. Doing a PhD on the computational aspects of gravitational microlensing taught me and awful lot about scientific large-scale computing; I started out on Windows and later switched to Linux since the former really sucked for *scientific purposes*. I believe this is on-topic and pertinent to the thread, moreso than the comments of users who have little concept of computing beyond their desktop or their corporate mail server. So, my apologies if you feel aggrieved about my pointing out the deficiencies in Windows for computing similar to CERN. I would welcome the cessation of sarcastic and irrelevant ad hominem and be very pleased if you could enlighten us as to why Windows is a better solution for scientific computing (I genuinely wish to know why you think it is - as a trained scientist I'm always prepared to listen so I can invalidate my own observations and assumptions).
Good thing they got it done before 1 July. Darn leap second....
The full quote is much better, but SlashDot's ridiculously limiting signature length forced me to truncate it: "The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity made by those responsible for the security of a nation." -- Alan Dershowitz in Tortured Reasoning.
I do not think Windows is better for science. I wouldn't try to tell someone their choice in computing was wrong. That would make me no better than an actual Linux zealot, Mac fanboy, or Microsoft snob. I know Linux works extremely well for scientific endeavors because it still provides easy access to the basic Turing machine. Just as Windows and Java are favored in business because they offer layers of abstractions that make it easier to distance yourself from the Turing machine to represent the types of models the business world requires. It's similar to the reason Physics favors calculus (where numbers only exist to show their relationship to other numbers or are objective measurements) and Psychology favors statistics (where numbers tend to represent natural objects or are subjective measurements) yet both sciences use the scientific method (hypothesize, observe, evaluate, predict).
My point was that your post was perfectly fine until the last three sentences. They serve no purpose but to discredit the reader's own experiences as irrelevant. I understand you're trying to force the reader to examine where you're coming from (scientific programming) . The problem is that it comes across merely as an appeal to authority, and those don't work very well on an anonymous Internet. You literally say "best to keep quiet about stuff you know nothing about," which says "you clearly know nothing, don't bother talking." To me, that's one of the most offensive things to say I can think of in the context of a discussion. Is what you said so far removed from "STFU & GTFO"?
In your response to my post, you also say " However, it was you who chose to interpret this defensively and in a particular way. I cannot help you with that I'm afraid." I would caution you against this type of phrasing as well. It also comes across as condescending. Communication requires effort of two parties. You are the one trying to communicate a message. Your job is to make the words you use as clear and concise as possible, because human language is inherently fuzzy and prone to confusion. Many words have multiple definitions as well as cultural connotative and denotative meanings, and all of these meanings are valid as they serve to communicate a message. You do not have the luxury of domain-specific jargon in general language, so you must be very clear with your wording. Even then, you must expect people to misinterpret or ask for clarification. It's safe to assume you would not have tried to communicate if you did not wish to be understood, yes? The alternative is a rather deep rabbit hole. It is then very insulting to be told first I don't know anything and should not respond, and then told it's my fault for failing to understand your message. This will just make me as a listener give up and dismiss your message outright.
Now yes, you'll note I said that communication is a two way street. As a listener it is my responsibility to attempt to interpret your message as openly as possible. That is, to look for as many interpretations of your message as I can, and then, using context, try to decide on the correct one. Additionally, it is the listener's responsibility to ask for clarification when they do not understand the message. Intentionally choosing to interpret things in the most offensive way possible will simply make the speaker give up, I agree. The talking heads on what passes for television news today are far more guilty of this than most lawyers, to the detriment of understanding everywhere. My response to your post was my way -- agreeably unfair and
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
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 !
Many thanks for taking the time to write such and erudite post. I'll confess that the closing of my original post was unnecessarily dismissive. It was not intended for you but to shut down frostilicious2, who has subsequently been adjudged as Flamebait by our fellow Slashdotters. However, I would ask you to reconsider the points I made in my first and second posts. I use Windows (gaming at home), Linux (work servers) and Mac OS X (my home and work development desktop, thanks to Java) on a daily basis - so I feel I have some understanding of the limitations of each of them. As I continue to point out I have done scientific computing in a manner similar to CERN (although in a different field).
So I don't feel 'religious' about any particular O/S. It is not hard to recognize the O/S-affinity of others (such as frostilicious2), so tried to achieve two things: a) point out why people doing scientific computing vastly prefer Linux to Windows, and b) prevent a potential inane flamewar with frostilicious2. I was also writing from work, so tried to write with the most brevity I could.
With regard to, "I wouldn't try to tell someone their choice in computing was wrong.". I think if you re-read my first post you will find that I point out that "techie people prefer Linux over Windows" and provide reasons why. This is not telling anyone that their choice is wrong, it is pointing out that tech folk prefer Linux for scientific work (which I stress in my second post). It looks like a fair few Slashdotters followed this nuance (or perhaps, it is just the notorious 'group-think'), modding it up to +5. Operating system is indeed a delicate topic. Since I use three commonly, even more on an irregular basis, so I tend to weigh down the effect with which people defend them, so fair point. However, I didn't think it it would be too 'on the nose' to try to explain why CERN chose Linux, given my direct and relevant experience. Pax.
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?
My post wasn't intended as a flamebait and, to be honest, I don't necessarily think that it needs to be interpreted as such. I just wish that the article had been less of an ad for Linux (which is really all it is) and had instead discussed some of the (genuinely interesting) computational problems that the scientists encountered. The really interesting things here are the underlying mathematics, the design and operation of the accelerator and the algorithms and hardware on which the analysis was performed. I don't really believe that the fact that everything ran on Linux is all that interesting. According to my wife (who does this kind of thing for a living, albeit in Japan and on a smaller scale) most of the libraries that she needs to run her algorithms can be found on Solaris or Linux and she (and her group) are quite happy to use either: to some extend OS just isn't all that important.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
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.
The title of the article is, "Linux Played a Vital Role In Discovery of Higgs Boson". While the algorithms etc are interesting I believe this thread was about how Linux (or Unix, as you point out and I completely agree still plays a major role in scientific computing) was a significant factor. Yes, this article is fly paper for fanbois. I also think it is also a valuable chance for those stuck on the corporate or gamer desktop to see where Linux is successfully operating in a completely different environment where they are used to. This may help such folks to grok why there are Linux fanbois when Linux seems to unsuitable for their purposes. It turns out Linux is excellent for scientific work (and networking, device control etc etc but the article isn't about that) and perhaps if the cubicle dwellers heard about the scientific suitability of Linux/Unix they might get a glimmer of understanding of why some prefer Linux/Unix over Windows - it is because the scientific types have a different set of problems to solve, and thus arrive at a different optimised solution.
The GNU/Unix-esque tool design philosophy lends itself naturally to solving the engineering problems in tasks such as the (successful) hunt for the Higgs Boson - lots of little problems/scripts cobbled together to process the flow of data. So you are right, while it was not Linux per-se that helped the hunt, it was the Free Software/Unix environment's whole toolchain (of which Linux was the basis they chose) that helped. Yes, they could have used Solaris, but it turns out most of their systems were Linux - which is what the article and this thread discussed for a scientific context.
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.
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.