Fermi Lab Supports Red Hat Linux

Linux joins IRIX, AIX, Digital UNIX, and Solaris as flavors of UNIX for which Fermilab provides core utilities and applications to the high energy physics community.

"Our investigations of Linux farms and the work done at other HEP labs has shown that the ability of PCs to provide massive computing power at low cost offers significant advantages," said Steve Wolbers, Deputy Head of the Computer Division. "We feel confident that Linux farms can be built and run successfully."

Fermilab operates the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, the Tevatron. More than 2,200 scientists from 98 U.S. institutions in 36 states and 90 foreign universities in 20 countries use Fermilab's facilities to carry out research at the frontiers of particle physics. Nearly all aspects of this research are computational-intensive, from data acquisition to data storage to analysis.

For research to be conducted following major upgrades to the two proton-antiproton collision detectors and the addition of a new accelerator, the main injector, and approximately 100,000 MIPS of computing power will be required respectively for both on-line (data acquisition) and off-line (reconstruction) operations. Clusters of PCs with a total of thousands of Linux nodes will provide part of this computing power.

For more information, see http://www.fnal.gov.

Common with UNIX footnote

LINUX is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Red Hat is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group. All other names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.