‘Scientific’ Red Hat to crunch numbers of Hadron Collider

According to an article in Linux Today, CERN’s huge Large Hadron Collider, the largest atom smasher in the world, runs on a customized version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that is modified for scientific purposes. Scientists hope the collider, a 17-mile tunnel under the French-Swiss border that has been planned for 20 years, will answer questions about how the world began by shooting particles in the tunnel at nearly the speed of light. Collider operations were abruptly halted after only a few trials last month due to helium leaks in the tunnel and won’t resume for a few months. But how cool is it having Linux number crunching 15 gigabytes of data for this huge project? So does anybody still think Linux isn’t ready for prime-time, mission-critical projects? Go Red Hat!