Macintosh

VMware has announced physicists at CERN, the legendary European Organization for Nuclear Research and the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics, use VMware Fusion to share Linux-based computer code via VMware virtual machines running on Apple hardware.

Virtual machines created with VMware Fusion are used by the physicists working on the experiments that run on the world’s largest particle accelerator, Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, producing beams seven times more energetic than any previous machine and around 30 times more intense when it reaches design performance. Housed in a 27-kilometre tunnel, the LHC has operating temperature of 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (-271°C). By studying collisions at higher energies than ever before, physicists will make further progress in understanding the mysteries of how our Universe is made and how it came to be.

With VMware Fusion, physicists use Macintosh hardware to run Linux-based software which links to LHC Computing Grid – a network of more than 150 computing centres with approximately 40,000 CPUs, handling 15 petabytes of new data each year. This Grid, which provides computing power for some of the organization’s most advanced experiments, can be accessed from CernVM, a customized Linux operating system running in a lightweight VMware virtual machine deployed on a range of PC and Mac workstations and laptops.