Approaching the speed of light with Debian: Debians' role in the worlds largest particle accelerator

Speakers: Nikos Tsipinakis & Federico Vaga

Track: Debian in Science

Type: Long talk (45 minutes)

Room: Méridienne

Time: Jul 18 (Fri): 10:00

Duration: 0:40

CERN is the home of the LHC, the largest particle accelerator in the world accelerating protons to 99.9999991% of the speed of light (that’s ~300.000 km/s). To achieve smooth operation of the complex CERN has a wide variety of hardware, from desktop machines to servers to industrial PCs. Debian has been chosen as the next generation operating system for all industrial computers in charge of controlling the electronics of the LHC. This talk will explore the reasoning behind choosing Debian as our next operating system and the experience integrating it with an extensive legacy CentOS infrastructure.