Linux Played a Crucial Role in Discovery of 'Higgs boson'

http://www.ubuntuvibes.com/2012/07/linux-played-crucial-role-in-discovery.html

by dartttt • 14 years ago

166 93 14 years ago

sigzero• 14 years ago

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

yawgmoth• 14 years ago

Correct. We've found something that could potentially be the Higgs, but we do not know with certainty that it is the Higgs.

Code_primate explained it succinctly: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/w0tty/higgs_boson_c...

mythz• 14 years ago

They have indeed discovered a Higgs Boson they're just not sure if its "the Standard Model" Higgs Boson yet.

kmm• 14 years ago

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).

tptacek• 14 years ago

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".

Cushman3• 14 years 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.

albertzeyer• 14 years ago

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

mechanical_fish2• 14 years ago

How 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.

boop• 14 years 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

guelo• 14 years ago

> What would they be using if Linux didn't exist?

Probably Solaris.

indrax• 14 years ago

What would Linux be good for if Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent the Web to make CERN more effective?

superuser2• 14 years ago

> utterly useless

Proprietary software can be pretty useful to people who find it worth paying for.

jolohaga2• 14 years ago

BSD and Windows don't even belong in the same sentence. Where did you get the idea BSD is like Windows?

dfc4• 14 years ago

I also think we need less stories that linux played a major/significant role in X, but for different reasons. I think we need fewer "tool y played a major role in my success" stories. The tool fetish is distracting.

The scientist in the linked story comes out and says that he is not sure about the differences between BSD and linux and that windows could have filled the gap in principle.

Tools are tools. Whether its a hammer or a Scientific Linux Cluster the significant factor is the user, the carpenter or the physicist. The search for the theory of everything is not a logistics/supply-chain-management problem it is a question of physics.

frankc2• 14 years ago

Not so sure I agree with that in general. What about the LHC? That is just a tool, too. Is that too not worth mentioning?

epistasis• 14 years ago

The ability to use Windows in principle was likened to being able to also use a raw Turing machine; i.e. that it could have worked but would have been completely inappropriate.

I think that Unix-alikes are going to dominate any sort of high-performance computing; and I think it's more than just the network effects of the current user base. The scriptability and composability that permeates Unix-alikes is essential for automating tasks across thousands of nodes. That's not to say that it's impossible in Windows, but it's not as much in Windows' culture. Being able to ssh to any node, occasionally draw graphics remotely, all these things are hugely important. The main advantage of Windows, point-and-click administration and lots of existing software, are not advantages when you can't point-and-click thousands of machines and you have to write all your software anyway.

jackhammer2022• 14 years ago

Yep right if these were the 90's,the heading would have been worth its pounds and it was made a cliche in the 90's itself.

pjmlp2• 14 years ago

Sadly when I did my trainship there in the ATLAS group (2003-2004), many researchers were moving to Windows as their desktop environment.

I still remember the discussions between still writing papers in LaTEX or move to FrameMaker on Windows.

pjmlp2• 14 years ago

So one tells the truth about what the reality is at CERN and gets down voted, great!

sargun• 14 years ago

Even some MSFT divisions openly admit to using Linux in-house. So, I'm pretty sure s/most/all/.

kyberias3• 14 years ago

Hah, care to provide some references for this statement?

sheff• 14 years ago

Completely agree with this. If you look at some of the CERN infrastructure pages, you see they use both open source and commercial apps wherever they make sense. For example when I checked out the DB infrastructure a while ago, they seemed to use a lot of Oracle[1] (with some MySQL in there as well), Scientific Linux for some stuff and RHEL where needed ( presumably for support reasons).

[1] https://openlab-mu-internal.web.cern.ch/openlab-mu-internal/...

rbanffy• 14 years ago

Just to point out open-source does not equate to non-commercial. Even if all you do is to report bugs, barter is a valid form of commerce and you are exchanging time for a better product. Also, Oracle Linux and RHEL, despite being paid for, are open-source. Scientific Linux is compiled from Red Hat's sources (as is Oracle's, mostly)

callan• 14 years ago

I see this more as a "team builder"; a reminder why we are involved in our software communities. It's great to take a moment every once in a while (especially something historic like this) and give ourselves or others some recognition.

Savvy managers and organizations know when to give praise-- they key thing is not to trivialize it. This seems appropriate to me.

vl• 14 years ago

Higgs Boson Played a Crucial Role in Discovery of 'Higgs Boson'.

Scientists working at CERN, Geneva have announced the discovery of Higgs Boson which is considered to be one of the most important scientific feats in understanding the creation of Universe. It is called 'God particle' because it plays central role in discovering itself.

Scientists from CERN just posted on Reddit their thanks to Higgs Boson:

I don't see any CERN related things here, so I want to mention how Higgs Boson (specifically, lower energy one - the only one currently discoverd) had a vital role in the discovery of itself at CERN. We rely on it every day in our analyses to enable particles in atoms of our brains and computers to gather mass. Without it this discovery would truly be impossible. Thank you, Higgs Boson!

zyb09• 14 years ago

Yeah, the news kinda comes down to: "CERN data centers run Linux", which is cool, considering the work that is done there, but not really that surprising at all ;)

Afal• 14 years ago

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!

coliveira• 14 years ago

Agreed. It is just like saying that pens and paper had an important role in the discovery... Great news.

why-el• 14 years ago

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)

rogerchucker5• 14 years ago

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..

dfc4• 14 years ago

Computational physics platforms are not "mainstream" products in the context of western society. That being said within the scientific community Linux is certainly "mainstream."

rogerchucker5• 14 years ago

Scientific community is not "mainstream" either because it projects "nerdiness" and "geekiness", both of which are associated with negative connotations and don't fit into the anti-intellectual narrative that is broadly perpetuated by the media.

kinleyd• 14 years ago

I'd tend to agree with you in that we could see it as 'every little helps'. Positive publicity never hurt, especially in view of the desktop market which remains stubbornly proprietary. I wonder when Linux will go mainstream there.

endeavor• 14 years ago

That's more like a "Linux is mainstream" moment. If it was truly a "Linux is awesome" moment, Linux would have given you more legroom and a free beer.

jeltz• 14 years ago

Linux is indeed mainstream but as rogerchucker many measure the success of Linux from the success of desktop Linux.

peterkelly2• 14 years ago

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

Umm, Android?

rogerchucker5• 14 years ago

Nobody in the mainstream identifies it with Linux.

jolohaga2• 14 years ago

Going to the moon was a huge success that didn't need cheerleading from a faction of operating system fanatics. The success here is the science. The machinery is irrelevant.

exDM693• 14 years ago

Calling Linux "not mainstream" is fair enough. Calling it "not a success" is downright wrong and misguided. Linux is successful beyond the wildest dreams of anyone. No-one would have believed back in the early 1990's that an open source Unix system would one day become as big as Linux is.

Linux powers Google, Facebook, Twitter, and a lot many other popular web sites. Linux is used on Android and a few lesser known mobile systems. Many if not most of the supercomputers in the Top 500 list are powered by Linux.

Hell, measured by the number of CPU's it runs on, Linux may even be the most widely used operating system today and it's been steadily increasing. (HN: anyone have any stats on this one?)

Go check your facts.

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

We've all seen a public display with a rebooted Linux setup or stuck in bootloader. However, Windows blue screen is a lot more common.

rogerchucker5• 14 years ago

What part of Linux "is not deemed" a success did you not understand?

shasta• 14 years ago

"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?

slug• 14 years ago

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 ;)

kyberias3• 14 years ago

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

mhurron• 14 years ago

That's GNU/Linux/Android to you.

cabirum• 14 years ago

I was under impression Android is a Java VM (Dalvik) running on top of Linux kernel, meaning it could theoretically work with any base OS capable of running JVM.

While it may use some linux-only features, is it really hardwired to it so much it cannot be ported elsewhere?

adamtaylor• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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

spudlyo2• 14 years ago

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.

rwmj2• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

I know my TRS-80 ran OS-9.

donohoe• 14 years ago

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.

drchoc• 14 years ago

find / -name "higgs boson"

nonameisfinetoo• 14 years ago

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

spudlyo2• 14 years ago

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.

jiggy20112• 14 years ago

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• 14 years ago

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 :)

Bjoern• 14 years ago

My inner RMS says, GNU/Linux.

induscreep• 14 years ago

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

keppy• 14 years ago

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.

Linux Played a Crucial Role in Discovery of 'Higgs boson'

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