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Rocket science

From the beginning GNU/Linux was a useful tool for scientists who had specialist requirements of their data and hardware, and didn't mind getting their hands dirty with the code.

For those who investigated the ephemera at the edge of the universe, amassing huge volumes of data on the composition of stars and their trajectories through space and time, or built specialist equipment for the interpretation and analysis of cosmic radiation, Linux was a cheap and ready alternative to proprietary Unix, easily adaptable for research purposes, and able to run on commodity hardware.

As early as 1993, when Donald Becker and Thomas Sterling began to sketch "the outline of a commodity-based cluster system designed as a cost-effective alternative to large supercomputers," GNU/Linux, developed by "hobbyists" and virtually unknown beyond its origins among academics and adventurous computer scientists, was the obvious choice of operating system.

Linux appealed because it was reliable, Unix-like, modular and flexible, and because the code was accessible. The result was the first Beowulf cluster, created at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to address problems associated with the NASA Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) project. One of the goals of the ESS project was to determine "the applicability of massively parallel computers to the problems faced by the Earth and space sciences community." Linux running on commodity hardware boxes was able to replicate the performance of a supercomputer.

Eternity is very long, especially near the end

Artists rendering of a Mars rover Linux has continued to be a prominent research and development tool for NASA projects, and was famously used to drive the command and control systems for the Mars rovers, the robotic geologists Spirit and Opportunity which were landed on Mars during January 2004 and are still going strong.

The technologies that grew from Becker and Sterling's work on Beowulf transformed the possibilities for those scientists who dedicate their careers to running simulations of events at the edge of our universe, and have proved equally beneficial in those specialised commercial environments that require heavy mathematical and/or analytical processing capabilities.

At the last count, Linux was the osfam primary operating system on 443 of the top 500 supercomputers, and has been deployed for many heavy duty projects such as Stephen Hawking's COSMOS project at Cambridge University, which seeks to explore the limits of eternity and the origins of the big bang, life the universe and everything, through analysis of the mass of data accumulated by satellites put into orbit by NASA and the European Space Agency.

A typical research project using Linux is SuperWASP, the leading UK extra-solar planet detection programme, which is run by a consortium that comprises eight academic institutions including a number of UK universities and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. The SuperWASP project was built on hardware and software from the Iowa-based company Optical Mechanics Inc (OMI) which runs on Linux-based architecture, and uses an observatory package called Talon, which has a slightly confused history and was available for a short time under the GPL - this version of the package may still be downloaded from SourceForge. Talon had its origins in a public domain package developed at the University of Iowa in 1993, became known as OCAAS (Observatory Control and Astronomical Analysis Software), and was released under the GPL by OMI in late 2002, before reverting to proprietary status shortly afterwards. As its original name suggests, Talon can be described as an operating system for observatory control and astronomical analysis, providing an interface between the telescope, CCD cameras, position encoders, roof or shutter actuators, weather stations, security systems and the network.

Next: Amateurs and Hobbyists

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