That's right! The LHC runs on Linux. To be exact, its uses a modified version of Scientific Linux, which in turn is based on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
This distribution's name says it all. Scientific Linux is meant for use by large research labs such as CERN and the U.S.'s equivalent high-energy physics group, Fermilab. Its main goal is to allow scientists to easily customize it by using scripts and Red Hat/Fedora's Anaconda installer. This lets every lab create its own custom distributions with minimal effort while retaining compatibility with the base distribution.
With the LHC, CERN will be using it to manage both the systems themselves and to make sense of the 15 petabytes -- that's 15 million gigabytes -- of data the LHC is expected to generate every year. (read more)
Fortunately, Linux is great at super-computing.
The latest "Top 500 supercomputer" list of the fastest computers on the planet makes that abundantly clear. Broken down by operating system, this latest ranking has 469 of the top 500 running one kind of Linux or another.
To be exact, 391 are running their own house brand of Linux. Sixty-two are running some version of Novell's SUSE Linux, including such variants as UNICOS/lc and CNL (Compute Node Linux). Red Hat and its relatives, including CentOS, come in second with 16 supercomputers.
As for the non-Linux members of the fastest computer club, IBM's AIX Unix, with 22 computers, is the only serious competitor. Microsoft and Sun, with Windows HPC 2008 and OpenSolaris, are barely in the running, with fives supercomputers for Windows and a mere pair for OpenSolaris.
(read more)
links
Wikipedia: Large Hadron Collider
ComputerWorld blog: High-Energy Linux: Linux & the Large Hadron Collider
ComputerWorld blog: Linux powers the fastest computers on the planet
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