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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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Both come with supported by the factory Ubuntu installs.. and both are very very fast -- and cheaper than an equivalent spec Mac.
You can get a DELL XPS 13 with Ubuntu on it for about $1K. Good machine, ssd, the whole nine.
I wrote a thesis on my Mac Book Pro. It ran R, postgresql, MS Office, Parallels, etc. with no problem. It was also lightweight and reliable. The only software that crashed on it was MS Office. I just bought a new Mac book Pro and I am running R, VMWare, Office, VPN clients, remote desktop clients. etc. It is easy to use which means I spend more time working on my problem domain and less time working as my own IT support. Which is important, you do not want to worry about your computer, just about your problem domain. Every hour waster trying to chase down 'mystery crashes' is an hour of life wasted.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.....
...who spent years at CERN, tell her to also learn Python. C++ is great too. They each have their specialty.
Mac laptops are very popular and useful at CERN. Macbooks are really popular with Particle Physicists and Astronomers, I think because it lets us run Microsoft PowerPoint (a necessary evil) and linux command-line tools, and write code. Linux is used on the compute clusters there.
Read OP's question. *She* wants Linux.
I'm an astrophysicist, my wife is a high energy physicist. Most of our colleagues use Macs of some sort, either Mac Book Pros or Mac Book Airs (depending how much local computation you plan on doing). However, we don't use them in a Mac-like fashion, but rather install XQuartz and use them as unix-like boxes. The remainder use Linux. Nobody serious uses Windows -- it almost qualifies as a warning sign when you see somebody doing so.
The idea behind using Macs is to be able to live in a mostly unix-like environment but also be able to run power point or the equivalent -- the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.
At the top end:
https://system76.com/cart/conf...
http://www.dell.com/us/busines...
(customizable with Ubuntu 14.04)
What do you recommend for running Linux?
The latest Ubuntu LTS is a good start.
For a C++ development environment?
I really like Code::Blocks, but I'm thinking that wi'll be up to her...
An nVidia GPU helps accelerate the only "gravitational wave" program I've ever run (https://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/). Likely not relevant, but hey you did ask Slashdot.
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).
I'm running Linux (Kubuntu) on a 2014 MacBook Pro Retina 16GB. It doesn't run well on this laptop. Things that I never did get working:
* suspend when closing the screen
* webcam
* phone-jack audio
* trackpad -- it works but I don't like how it works so I disabled it and use a laptop mouse
Things that didn't work after install but I was able to get working after some struggle:
* USB headset
* font sizes of KDE and various applications (Chromium and Firefox have their own settings)
I should note: some of the problems above may KDE's fault -- they might work fine under another desktop... dunno.
The best linux laptop I ever had was a 2012 MacBook Air. Everything worked well once Intell fixed their graphics drivers. Unfortunately it only had 2GB of ram and could not be upgraded.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
+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.
I think it depends on the Linux knowledge of the user and the time they have available to play with the system. As a postdoc and starting faculty member I used to have a Dell and it was blazingly fast but required a huge amount of tweaking to get power management and shutdown working (and ultimately these never really worked well at all).
If you look around a typical meeting at CERN the overwhelming majority of us now have macs. These are not as cheap as a Dell but they are a lot better at taking a few knocks (which happens if you are always carrying it around) and they just work without all the tweaking and configuring which Linux needs (and which I no longer have time for). The downside is that open source software we use in physics is not always easily portable to a mac although with the increasing number of mac users this is improving a lot plus you can always run a Linux VM on the laptop if you need to and I've used this to debug code.
Ultimately it depends on the user. Those with less knowledge of how to configure linux or with less time to do it should probably look at a mac. However if you have the time and know-how Linux on a Dell will be cheaper and possibly faster performance-wise.
First I'd just get a mac. the Unix environment is highly standard (yes the sysadmin is very different, but she's not going to be doing that). It will cost a bit more than a dell but not much and it will likely have a high resale value. What you get is highly worry free compared to running your own linux box which is worth it, especially for the circumstances you describe. There's also lots of distro and libs for the mac and the compilers are top notch. Ive noticed Many mathlibs are already compiled for SIMD or GPU on macs probably because of how standardized the environment and hardware is-- i certainly don't find it as inconsistent as Linux platforms.
And if you do absolutely have to run Windows or Linux at some point well it turns out that Virtual Box create a more standard environment for those platforms than any hardware platform.
And if you just can't abide the mac OS then wipe it an install Linux. That's effectively what Linus did (he now uses a Chomebook Pixel but just because it's well made-- he still uses Linux). Or get a companion for it: raspberry Pi 2 for $50. the new ones come with Free Windows 10, Free Wolfram/Mathematica and it's easy to run X-windows or a remote screen from the mac to the Rapsberry pi.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Thinkpads have always been very Linux-friendly laptops, as well as being well-designed and built, robust, and there are masses of ~3 year old ex-corporate units available via brokers, some in virtually as-new condition, at a small fraction of their original price. I've recently bought two top-condition X220s with 8GB RAM for around £300 each (I'm in UK, I got them from Tier 1 Online) and I expect them to serve me well for at least another 3-4 years. Add an SSD for a welcome performance boost for a modest outlay.
There are two proper Linux system vendors you can get laptops from: System76 and ZaReason. See if one of their machines suit out. Both of them have slim and beefy options to choose from.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Perhaps the best part is that if you can't figure something out on your mac, you can ask someone. With Linux you have to find someone with a setup just like yours, and if you google it you will find a proliferation of solutions none of which work for your rig.
Devo could easily have been describing linux when they wrote: What you got is freedom of choice [But] what you want is freedom from choice.
Standards are good. Macs don't really box you in they just reduce the proliferation of options of how to do something. It's not unlike how C++ is super poweful but python's simplicity lets you focus on the creative part more.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
She will have to write articles, and presentations. In physics, this is exclusively done in LaTeX, because of the equations. The faculty is likely to have computation machines in case she needs to do heavy simulations. Heavy computation power is not necessary on the laptop.
I would suggest selecting from the laptops with a very good screen one with relatively low other specs. Because reading many articles becomes tiresome on a low resolution.
For example: Asus Zenbook UX305FA-FB001H-BE
And avoid macs. You just pay more for the same. They are not worth it.
I wasn't in physics but I was in the hard sciences. I will mention in particular the matter of longevity. I started grad school with a ThinkPad - a rather cheap one - and it was still working when I finished over half a decade later. I defended my thesis with a newer model only because I needed better graphics capabilities for some of my renderings.
By comparison I had colleagues who had Dell, Asus, Apple, HP, Toshiba, you name it. Average life expectancy for them was 3 years or less. One colleague went through at least 3 laptops before defending. The Apple laptops weren't any better for longevity than the Dells, Asuses (whatever plural of Asus should be) or any other sans the IBM or Lenovo ThinkPads.
And don't do the Lenovo non-ThinkPads, either. They are just average. Grad school is frustrating enough with good hardware, don't make your daughter waste her time troubleshooting poor hardware.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Congratulations on your daughter's exceptional academic trajectory. This laptop may be worth considering. https://puri.sm/ https://www.crowdsupply.com/pu... This linux distro may be worth her consideration, as well. https://www.scientificlinux.or... cheers, frequency.dynamics
I have a friend who did his PhD in high-energy physics. He was first at Fermi, then later at the LHC. Data sets often started at 1TB and grew from there. No laptop is capable of handing that kind of data right now; you use your laptop to log in to the supercomputers that can. In other words, you don't need a lot of CPU power in your laptop; you just need a competent system for accessing the supercomputers and for displaying your results in presentations and publications.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Link to entry level. You can choose an upgraded version with SSD, or save some money and add your own. Either way, it's a solid system, ample power, excellent cooling. Web browsing and basic office software will get about 4 hours on the battery, under full (gaming, presumably physics sim) load you'll get just under two hours.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
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...
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 Ph.D. in almost any technical subject (including, but perhaps particularly Physics) is a credential that shows you can dive deeply into a complex problem, demonstrate inventiveness and independence, not give up, and come up with a comprehensive report (dissertation) that describes what you accomplished.
It can be hard to finish a Ph.D. on a project you have spent years on, and may have lost interest in. I'm not surprised you finished your Ph.D. in the end just because you started it. Many people finish just for that reason, if they manage to finish at all. But be proud that you are among those who did.
[Disclosure: yes, I have a Ph.D. in Physics too, so perhaps my bias shows.]
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
I'm a senior majoring in physics and doing research on the the Epoch of Reionization with a radio cosmology group. Most people, at least in the research group, are on mac's as am I. This, I suspect, is mostly due to them being unix boxes with a nice GUI. I'm not sure what software people studying GR normally use but I end up using a lot of Mathematica, IDL, and Python. My little macbook air seems to work well enough, I can do development, run some stuffy locally for quick tests, and spin all the big stuff off onto a cluster. I have noticed that doing some fun integrals in Mathematica involving QM can easily spike my CPU's for a bit but the convenience is worth it. Something that is easy to take to lab meetings to show people your pretty data is fairly important.
In my experience most scientific software, such as those listed above, seems to be available on Mac/Windows/Linux and work about the same. One downside to running Windows though would be that if you are going to be interacting much with a cluster a Linux/Mac system will allow you to more accurately test things locally such as bash/zsh/fish scripts that fire off your analysis program on a cluster or reorganize large amounts of data. A fairly easy workaround would probably be to just install Cygwin on Windows but I have little experience with that.
First, find out what the lab whe's going to woork at provides. No point duplicating that.
Then install Linux in a dual-boot scenario on her existing laptop. She might need a hard disk upgrade if the disk is full already. She can still use Windows when she needs it, and Linux when she needs *it*.
Note: Most Linux software is free. She should try it, install something else, try it, until she has a mix that works for her. Get on the mailing lists of the distro she's using. Try another distro. She can triple-boot if she likes. Distros are similar, knowledge transfers well, but they're not at all identical.
Then after some experience, she'll have some idea what's lacking. Don't waste your money until you know what she needs.
-- hendrik
As a postdoc and starting faculty member I used to have a Dell and it was blazingly fast but required a huge amount of tweaking to get power management and shutdown working (and ultimately these never really worked well at all).
If you want to use a Dell, I would advise to pick one from the "Business" line of products (Lattitude), instead of the "End-User" line (Precision).
Although they sometime don't have the latest bells and whistles, they tend to be much more supported, both hardware-wise (easier to find replacement parts later on) and software-wise (easier to get Linux running reliably on them).
I have a Latitude E6510.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
> the open source presentation software situation is pretty disappointing at the moment, and giving presentations is a pretty critical part of the job.
How so? How is Impress that disappointing? Academics are not marketers. They don't care about bells and whistles in their presentations. I got through my PhD just fine with black on white slides with no effects whatsoever. Content is king. Even PDF presentations are sufficient. The open source presentation solutions may not be top of the line, but they are certainly adequate.
I'll try to keep this short. I am a graduate Physics research student, so I have a lot of first-hand experience here.
First, you're right. Get a laptop that runs Linux well. Others have discussed this thoroughly already, no need for me to repeat what they've already said. Second, definitely get one with the best nVidia graphics you can afford. If Quadro is an option, choose it, hands down.
I've seen people try to do physics and chemistry research in Mac OS or in Windows. It's a pain in the ass (but possible). It's really not worth the trouble... just use Linux. Worst case scenario, even running Linux in a virtual machine is better than being that one person spending half their time trying to figure out how to do XYZ in windows, because the instructions will all be written targeting Linux systems. Also, in physics research, you'll probably be writing code that will eventually run on a supercomputer (or, in our terms: high-performance cluster), so you might as well be running something as similar as possible to the cluster nodes.
Regarding graphics cards, nVidia Quadro is where you want to be (and try to get a good one, if you can afford it). I prefer AMD. I don't *like* nVidia. Unfortunately, being productive doesn't mean getting to use what I *like*. Everybody uses CUDA, which is an nVidia technology. If you want to be able to test CUDA code, you're going to need an nVidia graphics card. There are different versions/levels of CUDA support, I think the technical term is "Compute Capability" or something like that. You want to get the most recent one that you can, and I think these come to the Quadro cards before they come to the consumer lines. The Quadro cards also have other features that make developing CUDA code easier, although I forget exactly what they are. I think they're related to debugging. Consumer GeForce cards DO support CUDA, but still try to get Quadro if you can. By the way, recent "GPU equipped" supercomputers usually have nVidia hardware, too. I really hope AMD steps up their game soon, but the fact is, nVidia owns the high performance GPU computations market right now.
For background info: I personally do computational biophysics research. Yes, I have supercomputers at my disposal, but no, I'm not comfortable using them to test early versions of my code. The on-site supercomputer is CPU-only. I have a workstation that I use for development, which has a quad-core Xeon and an nVidia Tesla card in it (Teslas aren't available in laptops, otherwise I would recommend that instead). Yes, I reach the computational limits of my workstation CPU and my GPU. It's not hard in computational research. Other types of research will also make heavy use of the processor and GPU as well... the difference is that you might wait a few minutes, while a computational researcher waits 80 hours for his results. My laptop is an 8-year-old 17-inch macbook pro. The nVidia GeForce 8600M GT supports CUDA, but not a recent enough "compute capability" to be able to test code that will run on my workstation or the remote supercomputers. I mainly use my laptop to remotely connect (ssh) to my workstation, but that only works well because all of my work is command-line anyway. Speaking of remote supercomputers, I just got a grant that will let me use the Oak Ridge National Labs supercomputer, called "Titan". You can look it up, but it's got an nVidia Tesla in every one of its thousands of nodes (Maybe tens of thousands? I forget.). My advisor and I are hoping to get access to Oak Ridge's brand-new "Summit" supercomputer, which will also be running lots of nVidia GPUs. You can google Titan and Summit for details. Even if you're not doing computational research, or using supercomputers, most research packages support using CUDA for GPU acceleration, so it's a good idea to have anyway.
Point is: Linux + nVidia Quadro. As for brands? Who knows. My workstation is a Dell. My laptop is a Mac. I bought a Mac way-back-when because I knew it would be a "common" hardware configuration (since there's less variety in M
I'm a career physicist, and I regularly take college interns. She can use whatever she is comfortable with. I I need my interns to have some particular computer or software I will get it for them.
Personal computers in physics are mostly for writing reports and quick calculations. High power computation and data analysis is done on dedicated server farms.The personal computer is just used as a terminal.