

Linux Played a Crucial Role in Discovery of 'Higgs boson' - dartttt
http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/linux-played-crucial-role-in-discovery.html

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tptacek
Do we still need to point things like this out? Who here thought Linux
_didn't_ play a major role at CERN? Linux is the norm in large data center
applications. What percentage of US commodities and securities transactions
are touched by Linux? My guess is "most".

~~~
Cushman
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.

~~~
albertzeyer
I'm curious: For the applications at CERN, would BSD really make much
difference to Linux?

~~~
obtu
It 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.

~~~
ryanjkirk
Quite 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.

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donohoe
I think we should take a step back and also find a moment for another unsung
hero, water.

Water also played a bigger role in the discovery of Higgs boson than Linux.
Without water the researchers would surely have died of thirst weeks or days
after starting work at CERN.

In "water" we trust.

On that note - what about paper and pens. Would the discovery have been
possible without paper and pens? We'll never know for sure.

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jiggy2011
I see a lot of comments here saying that the fact that they used Linux is more
or less irrelevant. This is probably true to a large degree since Linux is
basically a generic white label operating system that you can build on top of,
so if your doing something this niche there is little reason not to use it
since most of your clever stuff is probably custom anyway.

However there is definitely a large PR angle to this too. Let's imagine that
they had used Microsoft Azure to crunch all the data or iPads to view/analyze
it do you not think that MS or Apple would make a big deal out of it?

Whilst most HN readers probably understand the reach and dominance that Linux
has in a huge number of areas, most people do not. I've heard it said many
times even from people who work in tech "Linux is just a hippy OS for geeks
and will never be taken seriously". LHC is now one extra thing you can add to
the rebuttal.

~~~
nickbarnwell
But does that add or detract to the image of it being a "hippy OS for geeks"?
I would wager most people know even less about particle physics and what the
average practitioner does than they do about software engineering. It very
much preserves the idea of it being an OS for geeks, by geeks.

If what you meant by "[most people do not] understand the reach and dominance
that Linux has in a huge number of areas" was more in the sense of "Linux is a
viable platform for building our business on" than "It's almost the year of
Linux on the Desktop!" I apologise :)

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spudlyo
These kinds of articles were much more important/interesting in the 90s when
it wasn't clear that Linux was ever going to be adopted by business or become
mainstream. For example in the late 90s when the Burlington Coat Factory
started to roll out Linux clients to all of its warehouses, it was a big deal.

Now Linux is everywhere from smartphones to supercomputers, and has pretty
much outlasted or killed off all its former proprietary UNIX competitors. It'd
be news if AIX, Tru64, SCO, or Solaris had anything to do with the discovery.
We can stop doing this now, we've won.

~~~
rwmj
I was writing scientific X-ray detector software in the early 90s, and it all
ran on ... OS-9.

(And for the newbies around, that's got nothing to do with Macs)

~~~
sixothree
I know my TRS-80 ran OS-9.

~~~
rwmj
OS-9 was pretty cool considering it was a fully fledged multitasking OS that
ran in a very tiny amount of RAM (I think 128K was the minimum?).

Of course _we_ ran it in 8MB on 68020s which was simply luxury.

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shasta
"In terms of data analysis, Windows could be used in principle. We could also
use some type of device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according
to a simple table of rules. [...]"

The age old dilemma: Windows or Turing machihe?

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spudlyo
When CERN presented their findings they used the Comic Sans font, so I guess
you could say that Microsoft also played a role in discovery of the 'Higgs
boson'. Ha!

Maybe the EU geocities was rife with teenage girls using Verdana, and
Europeans secretly snicker at slide decks made by American physicists.

------
adamtaylor
Can anyone comment on what sort of software they use for collecting and
analyzing this kind of data? Python+numpy? Matlab? Gnuplot? In a past life I
was a neuroscientist, and although you could theoretically do experimental
neuroscience entirely using open source tools, almost no one does in practice.

~~~
deltasquared
They make their own data analysis software called ROOT. It is C++ based. I got
to use some of this when I was an undergraduate in the late 90's. Looks like
it is still going strong.

If you are interested, it is all open source and available here:
<http://root.cern.ch>

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sigzero
They have not declared it to be "Higgs boson" yet.

~~~
mythz
They have indeed discovered _a_ Higgs Boson they're just not sure if its "the
_Standard Model_ " Higgs Boson yet.

~~~
kmm
The have discovered a boson, but it's unknown what it is. There's just three
things we know about the new particle. Its mass, its charge (0) and that it
has integer spin (0 or 2).

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slug
I just wish Google had named their "mobile operating system" as Linux/Android
instead of just Android, and have a "Powered by Linux" on their homepage, this
way many more people would realize that they use Linux more often than they
think. The problem is that then we would have purists that would call for a
GNU/Linux/Android and others would ask for Powered by libc, engineers, your
utility company, lunch from the Burger Joint Inc, pigeons, etc ;)

~~~
kyberias
Yes, Linux/Android! That sounds so sexy! I wonder why they didn't do it. :)

~~~
mhurron
That's GNU/Linux/Android to you.

~~~
zokier
Except that Android doesn't (sadly) have GNU userland.

~~~
exDM69
That's because every technical decision in Android has been done by lawyers.
Or at least it seems like that to an Android driver developer.

If I had a buck every time Android does something stupid (their libc, bionic,
is the primary culprit) that works just fine in GNU land, I wouldn't be
developing drivers for Android.

~~~
Zigurd
Actually, that's because the designers of Android took the gamble of replacing
the Linux userland with a touch-oriented layer built on a managed language
runtime.

They did this instead of trying to evolve it toward a vague goal in that
general direction, or trying to drag along legacy apps.

In hindsight, it's obviously the right thing to have done. But it was a gamble
at the time.

~~~
exDM69
> Actually, that's because the designers of Android took the gamble of
> replacing the Linux userland with a touch-oriented layer built on a managed
> language runtime

No, I wasn't talking about the UI and the Dalvik virtual machine. I was
talking about what's underneath.

That darn libc, for example. Every operating system needs some kind of user
space standard library that deals with system calls and such. Android could
have used glibc or uclibc like all the other Linux-based platforms do. But no,
they wrote their own. To avoid GPL licence.

Which libc you use does not make a difference to your customers, so you won't
be adding any value by rolling your own. Instead, you get decades worth of
maintenance to take care of. And now Android has this crappy libc that they
don't do a very good job in maintaining and lots of little things are broken.
If I had to guesstimate, they have used at least a million dollars (and
counting) worth of developer time on that libc with absolutely zero value
created.

Android is full of these silly examples of things gone wrong. As a customer,
you won't see them. As an application developer you might get a glimpse but if
you stay within the Dalvik sandbox, you're relatively safe. If you go NDK, try
to port an existing software to Android or work with the internals, may lord
have mercy on your soul.

It's saturday. I don't want to talk about Android any longer.

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keppy
The evolution of social and scientific computing has made _nix a part of
everyone's life. I believe this is due largely to the fact that_ nix works in
a way that agrees nicely with the aesthetic determination we as hackers bring
to our code.

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drchoc
find / -name "higgs boson"

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induscreep
Wasn't it RHEL/Centos based Scientific Linux, and had nothing to do with
Debian/Ubuntu/Failbuntu?

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Afal
Great news everyone computers were used to do that thing that everyone's
talking about! Aren't we so cool that something we talk about everyday is used
in other things? I just get so excited when I think that the little machine
that I've got on my lap now could be used for amazing scientific discoveries.
Nobel Prize here I come!

~~~
why-el
Not just computers though, a computer with an open source operating system
that most hackers on this site would like to see more adoption of. This is a
triumph for the open source community. (Not to impugn their previous
achievements of course, this just goes with the current trend being the Higgs
potential discovery)

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Bjoern
My inner RMS says, GNU/Linux.

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rogerchucker
This story is important because in the Western society something that is not
"mainstream" is not considered a success. You don't see Linux on a lot of
consumer devices where people graphically interact with the OS and hence Linux
as an OS is deemed "not mainstream" and hence deemed "not a success". These
stories will be unnecessary only when society moves past this shallowness and
I just don't see that happening any time soon.

BTW, my favorite "Linux is awesome" moment? Watching an inflight system in
front of my seat in a Delta flight reboot..

~~~
peterkelly
> You don't see Linux on a lot of consumer devices where people graphically
> interact with the OS

Umm, Android?

~~~
rogerchucker
Nobody in the mainstream identifies it with Linux.

~~~
peterkelly
Does that matter?

~~~
rogerchucker
Yes it does

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nonameisfinetoo
So did oxygen ... and food ... and beverages.

