Comments on: Large Hadron Collider Powered By…Apple?

By: Tordah

Tordah — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:59:16 +0000

Wow, really? This is all you have for a blog entry.

"IN OTHER NEWS, MAN IS SEEN WITH AN iPHONE".

Regardless, Mac OS X is an excellent scientific platform, primarily because of the UNIX underpinnings, but also because of the commercial nature of the OS itself; commercial software is actually released for it.

By: fresh

fresh — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:21:44 +0000

Bit late on this hot news ;)

This was posted to the apple hot news ages ago…

http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/briancox/

By: John Slade

John Slade — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 18:39:18 +0000

I find that the author of this article did not do his homework. He titled the article “Large Hadron Collider Powered By…Apple?” when that question should never have been asked in the first place. It’s all to easy to go to the web site LHC Computer Grid and find that the LHC is powered by Scientific Linux. Any JOURNALIST could easily have found out this information. Instead they seem to want to use the fact that one person uses a laptop made by Apple to promote Apple as powering the project.

I think journalistic standards should prevail over promoting of a product. Shameless promotion of a product does not lend itself to any sort of credibility.

By: Kris Jones

Kris Jones — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:10:03 +0000

Cern uses a variety of computer operating systems. The LHC certainly uses some Apple hardware, which, according to this link, run Linux programs through VMWare Fusion: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/cern.html

By: Joker

Joker — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 19:17:31 +0000

What are you an idiot? Srysly!

What makes you feel that “one single Mac” runs the entire LHC project? Also, do you see all those keyboards and displays around the cubes? What do you think they are connected to? Some backend systems – probably a cluster of Linux/*U*x*/Windoze/or some junk like that.

And when was the last time you went to a univ and NOT find a good/healthy mix of WinTel-PCs and Macs? The LHC is housed in a pseudo-univ – there people just don’t want to grow up and they believe they can keep doing experiments on tax-payers money.

Macs are fairly capable systems. Clusters of Macs are known to provide supercomputing performance – heck they are just Intel chips with super-duper NVidia GPUS.

So, srysly – stop getting excited that you saw somebody at LHC using a Mac. For all you know he’s just a janitor browsing pr0nz.

By: jopester

jopester — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:40:32 +0000

As an alternative, the picture of the Mac wielding science can be seen at: http://www.twine.com/item/12s65dyf9-3n4/lhc-sees-particles-circulate-once-more-nature-news

By: jopester

jopester — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:37:07 +0000

Oops! Wrong link and now I see it requires a subscription to read. The right link was:
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091123/full/news.2009.1104.html

By: obamapacman

obamapacman — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:32:58 +0000

@adamjackson
“At least try to measure in on why Apple is better.”

How about this for science and fact? Even has dollar figures too.
http://obamapacman.com/2009/08/high-performance-low-cost-super-computer-virginia-tech-mac-cluster/

I got other articles such as Danish Police High Tech Control Center quantifying benefits of using Macs.

By: obamapacman

obamapacman — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:26:21 +0000

Cool, would love to get photos. Which hospital?

FYI, it’s actually very easy to port Linux apps to OS X because they are very similar. Linux is unix-like, while Mac OS X is certified UNIX.

One benefit of OS X is that coding for parallel computing, used for high-performance computing (aka supercomputers) is already built into Mac OS X Snow Leopard. That saves app developers time, so instead of recreating what’s already done for parallel computing, when they use Macs, developers have more time to actually improve their apps.

By: obamapacman

obamapacman — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:21:15 +0000

Victor, thanks for link! =)