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Ask Slashdot: Choosing a Laptop To Support Physics Research?
An anonymous reader writes My daughter is in her third year of college as a physics major. She has an internship in Europe this summer, will graduate next year, and continue with graduate physics studies. Her area of research interest is in gravitational waves and particle physics. She currently has a laptop running Win7 and wants to buy a new laptop. She would like to use Linux on it, and plans to use it for C++ programming, data analysis and simulations (along with the usual email, surfing, music, pictures, etc). For all of the physics-savvy Slashdotters out there: what should she get? PC? Mac? What do you recommend for running Linux? For a C++ development environment? What laptop do you use and how is it configured to support your physics-related activities?
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Why would she need anything specific ? Any entry level laptop will have more CPU and GPU capability to do whatever she's gonna be asked. I doubt she will end up doing fine-grained world-wide weather simulation or end up requiring building Chromium from source. Hardware-spec wise, this is a pointless question... As for PC/Mac, it is also pointless. You buy Apple-branded products if you want all the Apple coziness and conviviality of OS X, the underlying machine is pretty much identical...
Does she want to / need to run the same software as her colleagues? If so, then the answer is an easy one.....
Local knowledge is key, so it'd be better to find out what everyone else uses and get the same. Research packages are quite often poorly written and documented, so having people who've fixed the problems already is helpful.
Note: I work at a research university doing IT support.
For serious data analysis and development a laptop isn't the right tool. You want a really good keyboard and a large display (or 2) so get a desktop. For general data analysis you will still want a pretty beefy workstation (e.g. >16Gb memory) and to get those specs in a laptop gets pretty expensive. For heavy duty work she is going to ssh or vnc to a big server/cluster and she will really appreciate the extra real estate on the display(s).
She can get any laptop for general email, web surfing, etc while out and about (or maybe a tablet?). But it is much easier to query huge amounts of data or write serious code at a nice desk setup in her room (or office if she gets one).
+1
Source: I spent 7 years of my life getting a Ph.D. in physics. By the time I got the Ph.D., the only reason left I had for finishing was because I'd started.
A Master's in physics, though, that's legit. You're still having fun, and still learning a lot.
Most people that work on Laptops spend a lot more then 1K on a system. For a work laptop 1.8-2.5K isn't unreasonable. And they usually last a long time ( >5years ) before they quit working.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
As a physicist (previously at CERN, actually), that is certainly what I did. Beamer and TikZ goes a long way, after a horrible learning curve (which I mostly got out of the way during under-graduate studies). After setting up initial documents it is a breeze to create new ones that build on the old ones, and you have all the glory of version control, which in itself is an absolute deal-breaker for using anything else, in my eyes.
Windows is certainly out of the question. The CERN infrastructure is really Linux heavy, but I know that home institutions of several groups lean towards OS X, at least for the more administrative positions. The data crunchers (which is typically PhDs) in general work on Linux configurations.
OS X and Linux setups can be made quite compatible, but there is no question about that there is a threshold to pass for full compliance. In any way, analysis is often run on separate Linux clusters over SSH anyway, so it does not really matter too much. PuTTY in all its glory, but Windows is not really a choice for a machine that is supposed to work with analysis. People working in the industry often have a hard time to realize why this is, but, well...