7 ms·
There are interesting facets to it, I think. 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 Wi
by Cushman 14y ago
There are interesting facets to it, I think. 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?
How many of those millions of man-hours contributed to this discovery? How many other major breakthroughs have they enabled? How much amazing potential is locked up in proprietary software, utterly useless?
A major discovery like this is a perfect chance to blow the horn for publicly-funded research, and open source software is a huge part of that.
- guelo 14y ago> What would they be using if Linux didn't exist? Probably Solaris.
- ryanjkirk 14y agoDoubtful. Seeing as they maintain their own Linux distribution, they would probably be maintaining their own BSD flavor instead.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- albertzeyer 14y agoI'm curious: For the applications at CERN, would BSD really make much difference to Linux?
- sp332 14y agoBSD kernels generally do not have such good support for hard real time applications. It's been done though, so I don't know if it would have a real impact.
- Mvandenbergh 14y agoNo need for hard real time, first level detector output goes through FPGAs which only pass potentially interesting data to the Linux powered systems which do further data filtering.
- obtu 14y agoIt would be harder maintaining a large collection of software outside of one of the major Linux distros. Debian/kFreeBSD might have a chance thanks to the GNU userland, but the archive is less well supported than with the Linux kernel.
- flatline3 14y agoWhy do you say that?
- ryanjkirk 14y agoQuite the opposite. This isn't about the userland, it's about the kernel. The linux kernel is where the high-performance cluster computing advances have been. The GNU userland is just a clone of the BSD userland, nothing special there. Moreover, FreeBSD and OpenBSD's packages are diverse, well-maintained, and current. But neither OS's userland nor any of their packaging systems have anything to do with high-performance cluster computing.
- lumberjack 14y agoI may be wrong but they probably have a support contract with RHEL or similiar or they are using a sponsored distribution that caters to their specific needs such as Scientific Linux. I don't know if similiar projects/teams exist for BSD distros.
- dfc 14y agoI doubt CERN has a formal run of the mill support contract with RH like other large organizations. Scientific Linux is developed (in-house) in partnership with Fermilab.[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux
- dchest 14y agoThey use RHEL too: http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/rhel/ http://linux.web.cern.ch/linux/rhel/ For offical usage in the context of Oracle production databases and eventually other applications requiring commercial support there is a limited number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server licenses available at CERN. For all other tasks standard CERN Linux distribution: Scientific Linux CERN shall be used.
- srl 14y agoIIRC, scientific linux is maintained by CERN itself.
- mechanical_fish 14y agoHow much longer would it have taken if they'd had to use BSD? No longer, because software was not the bottleneck. The hard part about finding a Higgs boson is designing the gigantic particle accelerator and the detectors, then getting the funding to build them, then building them, then running them for N hours and analyzing the data. These things took decades. They started in the 1980s, years before Linux.
- Cushman 14y agoI'd contend that manpower is the bottleneck, and time spent writing and debugging software is time taken away from designing and performing experiments. How much time, exactly, depends on the precise software. I'm not saying it's on the scale of years, but that's what I'm opening up for discussion. It's certainly plausible, given the sheer scale of work that's gone into the development of Linux, that there may be features that researchers would have had to recreate at great effort and expense had Linux not existed.
- excuse-me 14y agoHaven't kept up but 20years ago when I shared a building with these guys the computers were the bottle neck. The original design for ATLAS had a sampling system where only random blocks of data could be analysed just because the computers (and buses and memory) couldn't keep up - so the data analysis became a sort of monte-carlo process as well. And this was in spite of huge and very impressive arrays of custom FPGAs and Transputers (in the 90s).
- mechanical_fish 14y agocomputers were the bottleneck Perhaps, but we were discussing software. Specifically, "Linux" vs "some other operating system". I agree that advances in computing must surely have a lot to do with the discovery of the Higgs, but such advances are about hardware, not operating systems. Since the 1990s, billions of dollars, both public and private, have been spent to keep Moore's Law rolling forward, and that's most of what makes modern computers more capable. Anyway, it occurs to me that this discussion is a classic bikeshed. Rather than debate tricky and obscure issues like the quantum mechanics behind the Higgs phenomenon, the engineering of supercolliders, the politics of getting supercolliders funded, the ins and outs of data processing algorithms at CERN, or the techniques of manufacturing transistors with a 20nm gate size, we have fallen back to debating whether or not the license used for the operating system was vitally important. If CERN had had to implement a Unix entirely from scratch in order to do their job, they would have done so. It would have been a minor side issue. Indeed, from a certain point of view, that may be exactly what they did. Why discuss how Linux was vital for CERN's scientists, but not the other way around? Perhaps the reason why Linux was so good for high-energy physics is that high-energy physicists built it that way?
- boop 14y ago> How much longer would it have taken if they'd had to use BSD? Macs (BSD-based) are popular at CERN as well: Smashing Research at CERN http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/briancox/index2.html http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/briancox/index2.html
- indrax 14y agoWhat would Linux be good for if Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent the Web to make CERN more effective?
- gaius 14y agoIf TBL is representative, CERN would be running on NeXTStep if it still existed, or FreeBSD as the next best thing.
- superuser2 14y ago> utterly useless Proprietary software can be pretty useful to people who find it worth paying for.
- jolohaga 14y agoBSD and Windows don't even belong in the same sentence. Where did you get the idea BSD is like Windows?
- xrt 14y agoThe network stack? Well, I guess that's been removed, but it took a while...