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

[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

[Anonymous Coward]

[AC, as of some mod points spent]

ROOT, Data Analysis Framework

Kitchen staff

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Kitchen staff

[GameboyRMH]

Keep going, once you hit 100 cups of coffee you achieve transcendence.

Re:Microsoft did more

[Garridan]

Naw, I think Microsoft's biggest contribution to all this was the Comic Sans font.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Fanboys...

[SplashMyBandit]

> 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.

Re:If it was Apple...

[Tough Love]

Apple did not play any role in the discovery of the Higgs because it is too busy launching new patent troll lawsuits.