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Linus at Fermi National Accelerator Lab 46

Posted by justin++ from the tomorrow dept.
A regular reader wrote in with this bit: "Linus Torvalds will be the speaker at Fermilab in Batavia, IL, 30 miles west of Chicago, on Sunday, April 18, at 5:30 pm. He will talk on Penguins & Computer Chips with a special introduction by John maddog Hall. Fermilab is open to the public during the day. " Wish I could be there :) Anyway, I remember reading something about Fermilab building a big cluster with Red Hat. Anyone care to refresh my memory? Update: 04/18 01:31 by H : Note: This is not open to the public. The lab is, but the speech is not...so, put your keys back on the counter, and think jealous thoughts.
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Linus at Fermi National Accelerator Lab More

Linus at Fermi National Accelerator Lab

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  • NEdit (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And since were talking about Fermilab, try out their text editor NEdit. (ftp.fnal.gov/pub/nedit/)

    I really like it. Fast, reasonably small and clean. With, oh joy, syntax highlighting.
  • Posted by frmChem:

    When I was both a scientist and working in the Chicago area I attended conferences and met with
    researchers at both Fermie and Argonne National Laboratories.

    It may be difficult and the time is short, but try calling in and stress your scientific credentials - you
    just might find yourself invited.

    It may be a long shot, given it is a weekend night where making a phone contact may be difficult
    , but if it's important some effort is warranted.


  • Crysgem,

    You write beautifully...are you the bastard offspring of John Katz and Spinoza? More!

    Nick

  • Maybe things have changed in the two years since I was there, but the lab is open on Sundays, and Ramsey Auditorium is in Wilson Hall (the big building) which is also (partly) open to the public on Sunday. Call and ask first, but I doubt anybody would mind if you dropped by to see this, as the Lab holds public events at Ramsey all the time, and it surely has the space.
  • I was going to call friends and let them know and then plan a little field trip out there, but if it's not open to the public, then a trip would be worthless. Looks like all I'll be doing tommorrow is laundry.
  • No kidding. I have not heard Linus speak, but I have heard Maddog speak at the ALS and that was an experience. He gave a great talk about Linux and Education. He mentioned some great facts about player pianos, too. Quite a diverse guy!
  • ...like the Windows variants, Mac OS & Mac OS X Server, and plenty of Unix variants. Generally speaking, scientists have been heavy non-Windows users. I can't explain why they, more than others, would be heavy Mac and Unix users but I do know that a lot of scientific software is predominately Mac and Unix. I don't know if this is a 'chickien or the egg?' thing but the end result is clear;
    scientists don't use Windows :-)

  • If you get more info on this "All of us LUG'ers" meeting lemme know. AALUG (I live right down the road from Argonne) has been really unresponsive and I'm trying to find a group simply so I can meet others who use Linux in my area and learn more.


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • That page that's pointed to is merely a staff announcement.

    I called Fermilab and was given confirmation that I could show up and hit the address.

    I'm there! I'll have BEER! Linus will NEVER be the same!

    Muahahahahahahahaha!


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!

  • This makes a lot of sence considering how much Fermilab does with Linux. Check out The article on Linux on page 10 [fnal.gov]. The article refers to their Computing Division's policy on Linux [fnal.gov]. Which I think is really well thought out. I wish more large, distributed, organizations would put some sort of policy like this in place rather than trying to ignore Linux and then whine about it when there's a problem.

  • According to the announcement, the presentation is for employees and their families. Are there any Fermilab people here that care to adopt me for a day? ;-)

    --Joe

    --
  • "Fermilab's site is open to the public every day from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m."

    http://www.fnal.gov/pub/visitor_info.html [fnal.gov]

  • You might have noticed that I was refuting what the other guy had said. Fermilab's gates close at 5:00pm, and the talk begins at 5:30pm, so for someone who doesn't work there to be there at that time would be outside of Fermilab's "open to the public" policy.

    Now, since I do work there I might know a little more than you about whether that room would be accessable to the public or not.

  • Fermilab is also using clusters of Linux PCs (farms) for data analysis and reconstruction in the upcoming Run II [fnal.gov],and, for instance, for the CDF experiment's Level 3 trigger system [fnal.gov].
  • CmdrTaco: Argonne has a Beowulf and is responsible for the MPICHameleon MPI implementation. You probably had them in mind.
  • FWIW, I did a search for the word Linux on the FNAL web site. One hit was a calendar announcement from last year.

    WEDNESDAY, November 11
    2:30 UNIX Users' Meeting - Now Includes Linux - 1 West

    No flames intended, but any marketing director would tell you that it should read, "New and Improved! Now Includes Linux!":)
  • Ummm... didn't some scientists in Japan already prove that neutrinos have mass several months ago?
  • For what it's worth, I believe that Fermilab (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is the full name) was renamed that shortly after Fermi's death. Its original name was simply the National Accelerator Laboratory.

    Incidentally, it is very much open to the public with a nice vistor's center. It's worth a trip if you happen to find yourself in the western suburbs of Chicago.

  • Linux has truly saved us researchers large amounts of $$. Thanks, Linus.
  • If it's only open to Fermilab employees and their families... ;-)

    -Mark Gordon
  • Fermi doesn't have a cluster of Linux machines, but that's because the bulk of their processing needs fit a model that is better served by non-clustered machines. (the description as best I recall it is "download a dataset of about 1G; process real hard for half a day; return the results of that batch; repeat") What Fermi has is the most amazing assortment of machines from olde Vaxen (still in active use), a large custom parallel-processor array, the occasional SGI Challenger (I think), to several "farms" comprised of Linux on Intel. Again, as best I recall, there's one production farm of somewhere around 100 processors (in dual-processor rackmount boxes) and at least one smaller "experimental" farm that is in active service. Another even large farm is in progress. FWIW, they find standard cases on industrial shelving more cost-effective for this than racks, so it won't perhaps be one of the more photogenic processor heaps.

    There's a LUG based out at Fermi, named, for historical reasons, AALUG (Argonne Area). My probably not quite correct descriptions of the Linux farms caomes from a walk-through of the processing center that was the prequel to AALUG's last installfest. There's a somewhat out of date web page for the group at www.aalug.org

    There are several other active LUGs in and around Chicago, and a recently-hatched plan to form a loose "all of us LUGgers" group that is having its first meeting, so-called, somewhere in the swirl of activity surrounding Comdex.... uhm, here, the CLC meeting is mentioned on this page: clug.chicago.il.us/comdex/
  • This arrived in my mailspool this morning. Dan Yocum is the Fermi (formerly Argonne) employee who setup Linus's side-trip there as well as the organizer of AALUG. I'm afraid this is The Real Story on this:

    Hello all,

    As you know, the talk is not open to the general public, otherwise I would
    have posted the info far and wide. This is at the request of the Comdex
    officials. It is only by their generosity that Linus and his family have
    been able to come to the Chicagoland area. They don't want people to go
    to the Fermi talk and skip his keynote at Comdex. This is a philosophy I
    must appreciate and respect.

    For those of you who do not know, Linus' keynote is at 10:30 on Monday
    morning at Comdex, and is free to those who have registered (which is free
    if you do it via the net, see www.comdex.com for more details). There
    will also be a reception and LUG meetings which will be free later in the
    afternoon.

    And as you all know there will be a CLC meeting on Tuesday at 5:30PM in
    room N133 at McCormick Place, which is open to everyone, i.e., no Comdex

    pass is necessary to attend. The CLC is the Chicago Linux Consortium and
    this is our first meeting.

    Back to Linus at Fermilab: this remains to be a non-public talk, so don't
    think that just because you saw it on Slashdot, you're allowed to come to
    the talk.

    I have talked to the AALUG members and Simon has talked to the CLUG
    people: the same information that was passed along to those people stands
    today.


    Thank you for your support and consideration in this matter, and please
    re-post this message freely.

    Dan

    ________________________________________________ ___________________________
    Dan Yocum | Phone: (630) 840-8525
    Linux/Unix System Administrator | Fax: (630) 840-6345
    Computing Division OSS/FSS | email: yocum@fnal.gov .~. L
    Fermi National Accelerator Lab | WWW: www-oss.fnal.gov/~yocum/ /V\ I
    P.O. Box 500 | // \\ N
    Batavia, IL 60510 | "TANSTAAFL" /( )\ U
    ________________________________|_______________ __________________ ^`~'^__X_
  • I don't know if we are invited or not but take a look at the Employment Opps off of the home page.
    They are looking for help. Some of it was NT based though. Most required a BS, some an MS.
  • (as I, a Canadian, know well) They sure do grow 'em weird up there, don't they? Dave Foley, Scott Thompson, and Crysgem...maybe it's the air, or the Molson?

    Mike
    --

  • "Fermilab is open to the public during the day."

    -----BEGIN ANNOYING SIG BLOCK-----
    Evan

  • ...Put foot in mouth.

    "An Open forum for Fermilab employees and their families"

    -----BEGIN ANNOYING SIG BLOCK-----
    Evan

  • CERN the European counter-part to Fermi Lab was where HTML came into being. I am a physisist (besides being a MBA student - don't ask why) and I just think it's funny that HTML 3.5 was supposed to support mathematics, but then it was never accepted by the "corporate players". I want to put my physics stuff on the Web. For more than two years now. With XML (MathML) there seems to be a chance of doing this at some point in the near future, but it still is a long way from being build into the commercial browseres in a sensible way.
  • 'T'is interesting to consider the arraying of names and geography and history, the small-detail underpinnings of any such meeting. But those three factors are functions of one another to extent varying, non? Enrico Fermi, Chicago, Illinois, Manhattan Project, the great scientific - burst *irony intended* - that was the 20th century. Will our memetic descendants one day study/innovate at, or revere a "Torvalds Institute"? And what repututation would it bear? Would it spawn rebels such as Berkeley, ideologues as did MIT? *Chuckles* Interesting that the BSD kids "sold out", and the North-Easters remained committed. So much for West-Coast culture.
    And more interestingly, where would such a facility be based? Within Helsinki environs, or in California? That's fascinating to consider, yes, citizens? Here again with Torvalds the international infusion to American science, ergo American wealth and power. Will we now witness a shift, the onset of a balance, where Europe and other non-American spheres create equal or even competing streams to the American information structure, which in honest recollection was largely the cradle of much of our now-used network technology? And would these alternate spheres (I am considering Western Europe, possibly India) create network/information regimes that reflect their own societies, their own unique differences... or would they apishly reflect the American capital technocracy that seemingly is unconsciously imparted to any users (and managers) of these our tools?
    I am uncertain if Fermilab was so titled after the great Italian's death, or before. Perhaps it would inform these thoughts...
    I know comparitively little of Jon "maddog" Hall... if I retrieve and parse correctly, he is of the American '70s Unix generation, nearly following the Progenitors, Thompson, Ritchie and Kernighan. What will this generation, these individuals, pass on to our future? What influence or guidance, if any (in the social/power sense)? Will institutions bear their name? Will they remain relatively unrecognized and uncredited in "the Real World", as I seem to believe Postel is? It seems to me that, like the Americans and, aye, Europeans, who made their wealth and changed the world from the base of America in the first half of this century (A. Einstein, consider his pacifism), they've a responsibility to speak and think on the implications of their wizardcraft. A strict engineering mentality ("I'm not political") should be discouraged by these people... else that American example will be passed to the world, which (as I, a Canadian, know well) questions not American ways enough. Heh, well... I suppose 't'is difficult to be an icon... and I *would* prefer Linus to devote himself in this still-early time in largest part to kernel oversight... until our World Domination.
  • Shucks, the Fermilab-to-Minnesota Neutrino Data Link is not ready yet. [kepler-solutions.com] He could have piped his speech to Minnesota via neutrino beam. Even if the data rate is awfully slow...
  • You're probably thinking of this Super-K news [washington.edu] from June 1998. It is probably the atmospheric neutrino study which is being referred to in the Fermilab neutrino story.

    The Fermilab study will use a known neutrino source. Super-K is a directional neutrino detector which can identify differences between neutrinos from overhead, those from underneath (and have traveled the extra time and distance to go through the Earth), and those in the direction of the Sun. Super-K studies the differences between the neutrinos from various directions.

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