Linux Played a Vital Role In Discovery of Higgs Boson 299
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."
C++ too (Score:3, Funny)
Kitchen staff (Score:5, Funny)
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!
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Re:Kitchen staff (Score:5, Funny)
Keep going, once you hit 100 cups of coffee you achieve transcendence.
Re:Kitchen staff (Score:5, Funny)
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It looks like a heart attack on an EKG but you'll probably be fine once you go back to normal-time. Handy for saving your friends from a fire.
Limitations of Scientific Linux ? (Score:4, Funny)
I was exploring sci-linux' site and they had the "limitation page"
https://www.scientificlinux.org/distributions/6x/62/limitations [scientificlinux.org]
Well ... it's blank !!
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"Of course I was up all night Not from the caffiene I couldnt stop thinking about coffee! zzzzzzzzzzz COFFEE TIME!"
Re:Kitchen staff (Score:5, Informative)
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You're confusing coffee with cocaine. Coffee doesn't cause heart disease. It does, however, protect you against the most common skin cancers and can help stave off your brain's aging.
There is nothing whatever wrong with coffee.
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Where are my "mod up" points when I need 'em?
Heh; I got 'em!
(... Oh, wait ...;-)
The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:4, Funny)
If OSX is Uranium on the periodic table, .
So if I install OS X enough times on my computer it'll achieve super-criticality? Does it also mean that OS X is technically illegal under the NPT?
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That would make it illegal under its own TOS...
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No, but it melts the users brains the same way as uranium does if you keep it too close to your head.
Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:4, Funny)
OSX is BSD.
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Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:5, Funny)
OSX is BSD.
Great news! Kudos to Apple for stepping up to the plate and releasing OSX under an open source license. Maybe this will encourage Microsoft to release Windows under the GPL-3.
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Looks great, where do I find cocoa and all that graphical jazz?
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No, but really. OSX is Unix.
http://images.apple.com/media/us/osx/2012/docs/OSX_for_UNIX_Users_TB_July2011.pdf
Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:5, Insightful)
GNU/Linux is not a Unix(tm), but those of us older than Unix and Unix(tm) know it is a unix
Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:5, Informative)
"OS X is Unix which is all Linux is pretending to be"
Huh? That may have been true a decade ago.
Have a look at http://i.top500.org/overtime [top500.org] and you'll see that Linux overtook and topped Unix between 2002 and 2005.
OSX today? Not of any significant relevance for the last few years.
Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:5, Funny)
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Is that even a useful distinction any more? Do you think anyone would use OS X for serious number crunching?
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That's why 83.8% of the top 500 supercomputers all run OSX!!!
http://i.top500.org/stats/list/37/os
Oh wait... I must be a bit colorblind... that's actually Linux. Hmmm... is OSX even on this thing?
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what the hell are you talking about?
yeah, there are a few institutions (like mine) which suck the microsoft tit and "officially" prefer windows.
of course, the people who are really getting shit done (applied) tend to use linux or mac os x; and the clusters use linux almost exclusively. even most of the windows people have a secondary redhat or ubuntu box when they need it.
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Thats nice, hate to break it to you but Linux is still a huge minority even in the science/research realm.
That's because most scientists' computing demands can be satisfied by a moderately-sized spreadsheet. When it can't, a small amount of Matlab or R will do the trick.
Linux has the edge where it counts: high-performance computing. If you have a metric crapload of data to crunch, and it's not the sort of problem that fits neatly onto special-purpose architectures (e.g. BlueGene), Linux is it.
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Almost every physics professor in every university I've attended or visited uses either a Mac or Linux. I don't know what science you're talking about?
He's probably talking about business or other math-light fields.
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Is this the question one simply shouldn't ask?!?
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were they MS Powerpoint slides
Chances are they were prepared on a Mac. One of the presentations apparently used Comic Sans, so I suppose you could say that Microsoft did make it to the party for a bit of comic relief.
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Your ability to leap to absurd conclusions is worrying.
Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows is also as 'broken' as Linux or Apple to the Average Joe. *Most* people are too frightened to install software themselves and get their friends and family to do it - even on Windows. Now some people (especially the young) do take up the challenge and install stuff by themselves - and it turns out that apt-get/synaptic etc are actually *easier* to use than finding and installing the right Installshield/NSS program (or even Apple dmg) since in the latter you have to read all sort of crap and select all sorts of options to get it installed. On Linux the software is installed easily with a common configuration, only customizing the configuration requires any thought.
Linux works just as well as Windows or Apple provided you get a technical minded person to maintain it for you. If it wasn't for the techie Slashdotters looking after Windows machines then most people could not maintain access to a working computer. Therefore your argument that Linux is broken is really incorrect - what you ought to be arguing about is the degree of difficulty of (IYHO) 'broken' Linux vs 'broken' Windows vs 'broken' Mac.
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Because I'm part of the CMS experiment and our whole analysis stack is based on ROOT, and entirely built at CERN.
Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:5, Informative)
[AC, as of some mod points spent]
ROOT, Data Analysis Framework [root.cern.ch]
Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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OS X is Unix which is all Linux is pretending to be.
Linux Is Not UniX
Linux is Linus's Unix. GNU is Not Unix.
Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:5, Insightful)
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Does anybody on this site engage brain before keyboard anymore?
No. The ubiquity of the touchscreen and roaming connectivity means that neither brain nor keyboard is required, or very likely to be used, in the typical slashdot reply. Unfortunately the same can be said for many of the vacuous stories and their tedious click-seeking headlines.
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and not Windows licenses
The OS is a tool just like anything else. If Windows would have been more suited to the job they would have used it. They didn't.
Re:The Only Newsworthy Item (Score:4, Insightful)
The LHC experienced a two year delay from 2005 to 2007 due to budget issues
Yeah, and those budgetary issues had a lot more zeroes behind them than some Windows licenses would have. The price of proprietary OSs on every computer at CERN would be a rounding error compared to the overall cost of the project.
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Besides the fact that Microsoft would be more than willing to offer deep discounts for what would effectively be a high-profile advertising project. Imagine the bragging rights it would buy MS in the enterprise if Windows was widely deployed in the front lines of such an important
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Cost is everything as science is done on a budget. More processing for your buck equates to more science accomplished.
Obligatory... (Score:2)
Wow, Imagine what they would discover with a Bewoulf Cluster then...
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Your low number gave you away... ;)
And if Linux wasn't there... (Score:3)
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.
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There is no perfect usable substitute for Linux.
Solaris (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientific installations used to use Solaris a lot. Linux isn't better. It's just cheaper.
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specially when used in specialized applications that often translate to a heavily customized kernel and 1 userland binary.
The point is that it can be customized that way. Thanks for pointing out one of the reasons for CERN's choice.
and have no licensing fees attached probably have more to do with the choice
BS. This is CERN we're talking about. They can afford whatever they want and they chose Linux.
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(Don't get me wrong, I've been a part-time linux-ite since 1993, and have been exclusively linux (OK, apart from one NetBSD box) for the last 12 years. However, it's far from perfect even in my nerdy little corner of the world.)
I wuld also like to thank (Score:2)
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.
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It would have eaten up all the funds for building the actual LHC though...
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If Linux wasn't there, they'd have to write it (using another name, of course).
Or do you think Linux has any ready substitude for high throughtput computing?
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Of course Windows would have extra software costs. It MIGHT be as usable but it would certainly be considerably more expensive. That's not even accounting for needing more hardware to do the same amount of work.
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Linux is indeed used in many scientific fields (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [debian.net] or will be interested to use it.
plus (Score:3, Funny)
Vital? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Vital? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
TIL smash Windows into OSX, destroying both.... (Score:2)
...and you'll find god.
Am I interpreting that right?
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Throw in Olivia Wilde and you've got a deal.
Ubuntu Linux? (Score:5, Funny)
If they'd had a properly working audio stack, they would have been able to hear it years ago...
In related news... (Score:4, Funny)
Computers played a major role in the discovery of the Higgs boson.
I hear electricity played a pretty important role, too.
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Ubuntu? (Score:4, Insightful)
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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?
Also the LHC computing grid [wikipedia.org] is built on Scientific Linux.
Comic? (Score:2)
Linux Played a Vital Role In Discovery of Higgs Bo (Score:5, Funny)
I hope people appreciate the gravity of that statement.
If Microsoft had been involved (Score:3)
If Microsoft had been involved they would have discovered the Zune boson, the particle that mediates pogo dancing.
Aren't We Past This? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is hardly surprising (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [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!
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A Kernel that was provided by someone else.
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Windows is a vital part of the LHC (Score:2)
http://www.lhc.gov.uk/Frameworks-Directory/Aluminium-Windows-Doors-A5/ [lhc.gov.uk]
what?
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What is a research grant but a donation from the people that actually make money and provide a real service to the world?
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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%?
Re:Microsoft did more (Score:5, Funny)
Naw, I think Microsoft's biggest contribution to all this was the Comic Sans font.
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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.
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Re:Microsoft did more (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Obvious troll is obvious.
Guys, for the good of the internet don't respond to these kinds of posts.
Re:The Little Platform That Could (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:The Little Platform That Could (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Re:Fanboys... (Score:5, Informative)
> 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.
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Re:If it was Apple... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple did not play any role in the discovery of the Higgs because it is too busy launching new patent troll lawsuits.