No longer, because software was not the bottleneck.

The hard part about finding a Higgs boson is designing the gigantic particle accelerator and the detectors, then getting the funding to build them, then building them, then running them for N hours and analyzing the data. These things took decades. They started in the 1980s, years before Linux.

I'm not saying it's on the scale of years, but that's what I'm opening up for discussion. It's certainly plausible, given the sheer scale of work that's gone into the development of Linux, that there may be features that researchers would have had to recreate at great effort and expense had Linux not existed.

This is a leading line of discourse -- you're strongly implying that Linux permitted more rapid development, but you don't appear to have any supportable justification for why that would be the case.

It has been noted by others (in the article, for example) that Linux is the undisputed king of high-performance computing, in the public sector at least. My only assumption is that that is not random, that there are reasons for it.

I'm not trying to lead the discourse anywhere -- I'm certainly not a Linux fanatic, if that's what you're implying. I just think it's utterly plausible that Linux, and the open source community in general, saved these people a whole bunch of time.

I have no idea whether that was part of the reasoning for this or not though.

It's complicated, more so than can be adequately addressed here, and far beyond a simple question of Linux specifically "saving [people] a whole bunch of time".

The original design for ATLAS had a sampling system where only random blocks of data could be analysed just because the computers (and buses and memory) couldn't keep up - so the data analysis became a sort of monte-carlo process as well. And this was in spite of huge and very impressive arrays of custom FPGAs and Transputers (in the 90s).

Perhaps, but we were discussing software. Specifically, "Linux" vs "some other operating system".

I agree that advances in computing must surely have a lot to do with the discovery of the Higgs, but such advances are about hardware, not operating systems. Since the 1990s, billions of dollars, both public and private, have been spent to keep Moore's Law rolling forward, and that's most of what makes modern computers more capable.

Anyway, it occurs to me that this discussion is a classic bikeshed. Rather than debate tricky and obscure issues like the quantum mechanics behind the Higgs phenomenon, the engineering of supercolliders, the politics of getting supercolliders funded, the ins and outs of data processing algorithms at CERN, or the techniques of manufacturing transistors with a 20nm gate size, we have fallen back to debating whether or not the license used for the operating system was vitally important.

If CERN had had to implement a Unix entirely from scratch in order to do their job, they would have done so. It would have been a minor side issue. Indeed, from a certain point of view, that may be exactly what they did. Why discuss how Linux was vital for CERN's scientists, but not the other way around? Perhaps the reason why Linux was so good for high-energy physics is that high-energy physicists built it that way?

I would also question whether 20+ years of devlopment on a private UNIX clone would have produced a better result than Linux. There are plenty of private UNIXes but sarcely a convincing argument that a single one is better than Linux in some meaningful way.

Whether some semi-imaginary particle fits the parameters of some semi-imaginary theory is pretty uninteresting ;-)

I think they prefer it if we call such things "complex" rather than "semi-imaginary" ;-)

I found that once you get past the technicalities and when you get back to a bird's eye view, interactions among elementary particles follow almost naturally and looks deceptively simple [0], and the postulate of the Higgs boson existence seems like one† of the obvious solutions explaining mass.

Now when you get back down in the trenches and have to properly define it theoretically I'm positively convinced it is another matter entirely in terms of complexity.

† Then again, we previously tried to explain how light could be propagating through a postulated medium called luminiferous aether. Hopefully it looks like the LHC experiments are not going the way aether experiments did.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Gauge_bosons

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux

For offical usage in the context of Oracle production databases and eventually other applications requiring commercial support there is a limited number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server licenses available at CERN. For all other tasks standard CERN Linux distribution: Scientific Linux CERN shall be used.

Macs (BSD-based) are popular at CERN as well:

Smashing Research at CERN http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/briancox/index2.html

Probably Solaris.

Proprietary software can be pretty useful to people who find it worth paying for.