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HISTORICAL INFORMATION » COMPUTING
Historical Content Note: The following material is reprinted from publications from throughout Fermilab's history. It should be read in its original historical context.

Major Computing Milestones

Source: Computing Bits Special Issue, October 2014

Oct. 1989 - The Computing Department, the Advanced Computer Program and personnel from the research department merge to create the Computing Division headed by Thomas Nash

April 1990 - STK 3480 tape drive, STK = 1.2 TB tape robot

Sept. 1990 - Cyber mainframe computers removed from Wilson Hall through windows

1991 - First 8mm tape used to record data from a particle physics experiment

1991 - Fermilab establishes its first UNIX farm

Jan. 1991 - ACPMAPS Weitek version launches, performs 5 Gflops

May 1992 - Dzero experiment detector observes first proton-antiproton collisions

Sept. 1993 - DART version 1.0 is released

1994 - Joel Butler becomes head of the Computing Division

1994 - First Digital linear (DLT) Tape used (10 GB of storage)

April 1994 - Fermilab's first official website goes live. 12 thousand hits on the first day

Dec. 1994 - LHC approved by CERN

1995 - Amdahl decommissioned

Feb. 1995 - Tevatron sets a world record for number of high-energy proton-antiproton particle collisions

March 1995 - Discovery of the top quark announced by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) and Dzero

1997 - Sequential Access via Metadata (SAM) project begins

1997 - PC Farms pilot project to show that commodity hardware with a free OS could be used for Farms computing

1997 - US CMS computing project is established

June 1997 - First external review (known as the von Ruden review) of the CDF, D0 CD Joint Run II Offline Computing Project project to design and build computing systems for Run II

1998 - Matthias Kasemann becomes head of the Computing Division

1998 - GRAU/ADIC tape robot, LTO3, 8mm tape DLT

Jan. 1998 - First PC farm with dual 333-MHz Pentium III

March 1998 - Discovery of the B-sub-c meson, the last of the quark-antiquark pairs known to exist, at CDF

June 1998 - Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) begins operation

July 1998 - Enstore mass data storage project begins in preparation of the Run II experiments

Aug. 1998 - First version of Fermi Linux released

Oct. 1998 - First functioning prototype of Sequential Access via Metadata (SAM)

1999 - SDSS finds a faint red object in its data, later found to be a class T dwarf star

March 1999 - Direct charge parity (CP) violation observed by K-mesons by KTeV experiment

2000 - SDSS finds most distant quasar yet (to that point in time)

July 2000 - DONuT announces the discovery of the tau neutrino

Nov. 2000 - US CMS Software and Computing program begins. Fermilab named CMS tier 1 computing site

Nov. 2000 - First lattice QCD cluster ("qcd80") installed at New Muon Lab; houses the first Linux based tightly-coupled computing center for Lattice QCD computations

March 2001 - Tevatron Run II

March 2001 - D0 starts processing data with SAM for Run II

Aug. 2001 - Fermilab receives $1.28 million of DOE SciDAC awards for work in Lattice Gauge Computing, Open Science Grid and Accelerator Science and Simulation

Nov. 2002 - Vicky White becomes head of the Computing Division

Jan. 2003 - Lattice QCD "w" cluster 1.228 teraflop peak

Nov. 2003 - Grid2003 project begins at SC2003

2004 - Sloan Digital Sky Survey - supernova (SDSS SN) survey born

2004 - Grid Computing Center (GCC) is commissioned and built

2004 - Heavy quark B-sub-d mixing observed by CDF and DZero

May 2004 - Scientific Linux created; now used worldwide

Dec. 2004 - LHC Physics Center (LPC) working groups formed at Fermilab

2005 - Open Science Grid established

2005 – SL8500 Tape LTO3 200GB, 400GB robot

April 2005 - First "core" FermiGrid services deployed

Nov. 2005 - Lattice QCD "pion" 3.329 teraflop peak

Nov. 2005 - SAM deployed by CDF

July 2006 - Lattice Computing Center refurbished with new raised floor, replacement of chiller-based air conditioners with gas-based condensers and overhead cooling units

Sept. 2006 - Lattice QCD "kaon" 9.6 teraflop peak

Sept. 2006 - Observation of B-sub-s meson matter-antimatter oscillations: 3 trillion times per second

Nov. 2006 - CMS Center formed at Fermilab

Dec. 2006 - First issue of online Computing newsletter--what would become CD Tracks and eventually Computing Bits newsletter--published

Oct. 2007 - LHC Remote Operations Center dedicated

Nov. 2007 - Fermilab's booth at SuperComputing 2007 includes a 13-foot tall spiral of Fermilab's computing history

Feb. 2007 - CD reaches five years without a lost workday injury

Feb. 2007 - Job descriptions for Computing Professionals are being reviewed; first time updated since 1991, 1992

April 2007 - Real Time conference hosted at Fermilab

Aug. 2007 - Fnal.gov domain name renewed, celebrates 20th anniversary of its registration

Aug. 2007 - Video series on GCC computer rooms created

Oct. 2007 - Panagiotis Spentzouris named Principal Investigator (PI) of Community Petascale Project for Accelerator Science and Simulation (ComPASS)

May 2008 - The Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) publishes its recommendations for the next ten years of particle physics

May 2008 - Fermilab hosts National Laboratories Information Technology Summit (NLIT)

Sept. 2008 - Fermilab hosts the Pixel 2008 International Workshop

Jan. 2009 - Alpha release of the cmslite framework, a C++-based framework that will eventually become art is made; adopted by the Mu2E experiment

2009 - FCC third floor high-availability computing center and computer cooling center constructed

May 2009 - ADIC Tape robot dismantled

2010 - Joint Dark Energy Mission becomes the first user of FermiCloud

March 2010 - Vicky White named Fermilab's chief information officer

April 2010 - The Computing Division celebrates 4 million hours without an accident

Nov. 2010 – FermiCloud turned on after a project to launch it formed in fall 2009

Dec. 2010 - CD Tracks reaches 50th issue

2011 - SharePoint introduced at Fermilab

Jan. 2011 - NOvA adopts art after an effort to evaluate and produce new features

Feb. 2011 - GCC wins first of four thus far Energy Star Awards

April 2011 - New cloud-based Service Desk rolls out

Sept. 2011 - The Computing Division becomes the Computing Sector

Sept. 2011 - Tevatron shuts down after 28 years of operation

Oct. 2011 - Jon Bakken named head of Core Computing Division

Nov. 2011 - Grid and Cloud Computing demonstrate the use of a 100 gigabytes per second network at SC2011

Nov. 2011 - SDSS is listed as "One of the most amazing databases in the world" by Popular Science magazine

Jan. 2012 - Rob Roser introduced as the head of the Scientific Computing Division

Jan. 2012 -The Engineering Data Management System (EDMS) using Teamcenter officially launches

May 2012 - Data Movement and Storage group celebrates 40 PB of data stored

May 2012 - Fermilab celebrates 20th anniversary of website

May 2012 - The first tag (alpha release for demonstration purposes) of artdaq was made

June 2012 - artdaq was presented IEEE Real-time Conference) 2012 as a interesting toolkit and system that included HPC technology for building parts of a DAQ system

July 2012 - Higgs Boson discovery announced by CERN

Sept. 2012 - Dark Energy Survey (DES) starts five years of taking data

Feb. 2013 - Fermilab earns ISO20000 certification for service management best practices

May 2013 - artDAQ first used to take data from the DarkSide-50 time-projection chamber; artdaq-demo, which has sample code to help new and potential artdaq users learn how they can customize it for their experiment, is also released

June 2013 - CERN announces it will use Fermilab developed software Synergia for beam dynamics simulations

Aug. 2013 - DOE awards a three-year grant to the Network Research group for "Multicore-aware Data Transfer Middleware"

Oct. 2013 - Jin Chang becomes Deputy CIO

Oct. 2013 - NOvA processes test data on the Open Science Grid using the Sequential Access Model (SAM) and IFDH

Feb. 2014 - Rob Roser named chief information officer

June 2007 - D0 completes data reprocessing using SAMGrid on OSG

June 2014 - CMSSW released

June 2014 – FermiWorks modernized human resource system launched; joint project involving human resources and computing staff

July 2014 - Muon g-2 magnet arrives at Fermilab

Sept. 2014 - Panagiotis Spentzouris named Scientific Computing Division head

[Note: The original article contained many external links, some no longer current, that are not reproduced here.]

Click image to see full size photo
Heads of Computing, left to right: Al Brenner, Computing Department head 1972-1984; Hugh Montgomery, Computing Department head 1984-1987; Jeff Appel, Computing Department head 1987-1989; Tom Nash, Computing Division head 1989-1994; Joel Butler, Computing Division head 1994-1998; Matthias Kasemann, Computing Divsion head 1998-2002; Vicky White, Computing Division/Sector head 2002-2013; Rob Roser, Computing Sector/Office of the CIO head 2014. (1 of 9)
Fermilab founding director Robert Wilson and Jeff Appel, head of Computing Department, at the dedication of Feynman Computing Center, pictured in December 1988. (2 of 9)
Removal of Cyber mainframe computer from Wilson Hall in 1990. (3 of 9)
Computing staff, including Mike Diesberg (left) Richard Thompson (seated) and Ken Fidler (striped shirt), setting up equipment in the Feynman Computing Center. (4 of 9)
Left to right, Gianluca Alimonti, Dario Menasce, Margherita Vittone Wiersma, Paul Lebrun, unknown, unknown, Peter Cooper and Jim Meadows. "We were all trying to use this new computer to analyze our data. (E690, E687, CDF Run 1, etc...)," says Lebrun. "The ACP was founded and directed by Tom Nash, who became first Division Head after a few experiments convinced Fermilab Director that we could build and operate a computer for scientific research that gave us better capabilities than any commercial system, at that time. A 'user-support group for ACP' was then created, and we commissioned a complete ACP system (at least one crate of nodes), one micro-VAX, one 9-track tape drive, in collaboration with the ACP core group, who delivered the software and managed the boards." (5 of 9)
Left to right, Carmenita Moore, Gene Oleynik and Laura Mengel demonstrating the DART data acquisition system to George Zioulas (standing behind chair), a researcher working on the E835 experiment from the University of California at Irvine, pictured in Nov. 1993. (6 of 9)
Eileen Berman working on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) in March 1994. The SDSS experiment used a 120-megapixel digital camera, a pair of spectographs with the ability to measure spectra of more than 600 galaxies and quasars in a single observation and a 2.5-meter telescope in New Mexico. "I remember that I worked on the SDSS data pipeline infrastructure, which enabled the scientists to analyze the data taken with the telescope," said Berman. "I was involved from the very early days of SDSS (when it was called DSS) and it was very exciting to be involved so centrally to the experiment." (7 of 9)
The CMS group posing in the computing center by the racks that host the first set of computers for CMS Monte Carlo production and interactive computing. Front Row: Yujun Wu, Hans Wenzel, Shafqat Aziz, Joe Kaiser, Shahzad Muzaffer, Natalia Ratnikova and Vivian O'Dell. Back Row: Ichiro Suzuki, Moacyr Souza, Pal Hidas, Jim Amundson and Greg Graham. Pictured in 2001. (8 of 9)
First online CD newsletter. (9 of 9)