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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.
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.
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).
+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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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