Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.
TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust.
Looking ahead: CERN engineers have unveiled a complex plan to move a number of computers to a new Linux distribution. The upgrade is required to prevent older, specialized hardware from becoming obsolete, though it's turning out to be a challenging endeavor.
During a recent conference held in Winterthur, Switzerland, engineers working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) confirmed that the laboratory is going to move from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Debian. The switch will affect more than 2,200 computers, many of which cannot be upgraded to newer RHEL releases because newer Red Hat releases will leave much older hardware behind.
As one of the world's leading research institutions in particle physics, CERN generates massive amounts of data on a regular basis. The lab where Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web's original vision was already packing 49 petabytes of digital files back in 2016. All this data requires a solid, ever-growing IT infrastructure, and the same goes for machines designed to manage scientific experiments through custom hardware boards.
