Today I had the *immense* pleasure of a day away from SLAC. Wait a second. That sounded all wrong. You see, the pleasure was not in the separation from my laboratory; the pleasure was the company I kept while away, and the work I got to do. I got into my Honda Civic this morning and headed north on 280, grabbed highway 1 to Park Presidio, then cut across to Divisadero via Geary. I was headed to the Comprehensive Cancer Treament Center at UCSF.
My friend and colleague Joseph Perl is the visualization coordinator for the GEANT4 collaboration. In that role, he’s interacted with a lot of physicists, and not just the particle variety. Many physicists in the medical community are exploring a wide variety of Monte Carlo simulation methods, among them GEANT4. As a result, he’s had the chance to start working with a number of these physicists. Today, I got the chance to try to help one medical physicist to upgrade his Linux cluster from Redhat 7.X to “Scientific Linux”:http://scientificlinux.org.
The morning begins as it should: coffee. I met Bruce Faddegon in his office in the cancer center, where he’d just learned that his new Windows PC was infected with a virus. We met up with his friend and colleague Inder and headed out the back door to Starbucks. Over coffee, we discussed physics, its role in medicine and society, and even science funding (OK… I’ll admit it… I got us started on that). When we got back to the lab we fired up one of the cluster machines and started the upgrade.
I had commented in preparation for this we should “plan to spend a day just trying to upgrade one machine.” This was meant to allow us the flexibility to change the upgrade strategy as new problems emerged. Needless to say, it was a sound strategy. By 6:30 tonight, we’d finally managed to find a strategy that worked, and Bruce had a new Scientific Linux machine ready for him to test. There’s still some tweaking left, but Bruce is extremely well versed in configuring a linux system and I have no doubt the rest will be cake by comparison.
All in all, the pleasure was all mine. To meet such fine scientists, interested in perfecting the means to treat some of the worst illnesses, was more than a reward for a few hours labor on Linux. It helped me to place in perspective my own work, my own search for little particles.
