How the Tevatron Influenced Computing

New submitter SciComGeek writes "Few laypeople think of computing innovation in connection with the Tevatron particle accelerator, which shut down earlier this year. Mention of the Tevatron inspires images of majestic machinery, or thoughts of immense energies and groundbreaking physics research, not circuit boards, hardware, networks, and software. Yet over the course of more than three decades of planning and operation, a tremendous amount of computing innovation was necessary to keep the data flowing and physics results coming. Those innovations will continue to influence scientific computing and data analysis for years to come."

This is why we need the big projects

[sandytaru]

I got the mini tour at Lawrence Livermore National Lab a few years back. They've spent about three billion dollars on a proof of concept system for hot fusion. During the project, they invented a process to extrude entire sheets of solid ruby crystals, and hundreds of other innovations. Yes, three billion dollars is a lot of money. The things they had to create will reverberate throughout the private sector for decades, however, and they plan on selling off the final hot fusion plans to private companies who will profit from it once they've got all the kinks worked out.

Re:And the web...

[mcgrew]

U of I [illinois.edu] have had supercomputers for decades. Of course a lot of computation is needed for the Tevatron, from controlling the streams to analyzing the data. U of I is also home to the Tevatron. [illinois.edu]

Odd that people don't think of Illinois when they think of computing and physics.

PET/MRI

[sirdude]

In medicine, one of the offshots from CERN & the LHC has been the development/improvement of the MRI scanner [web.cern.ch].

The article barely scratches the surface

[stox]

I'll rattle off a half dozen from the top of my head:

According to Robert Young, one of the founders of Red Hat, Fermilab's adoption of Linux was one of the seminal events in the acceptance of Linux as a real operating system.

IBM's SP series of computers was inspired by the IBM RS6000 compute farms at Fermilab.

The original Linux CD driver was written by an experimenter at the DZero group at Fermilab.

Many parallel programming techniques were pioneered on the ACP/MAPS system designed, engineered, and built at Fermilab.

The term "compute farm" was coined at Fermilab.

Fermilab was the world's third web site, after CERN and SLAC.