Few people know that one of the most fascinating machines in modern nuclear physics — the Nuclotron, located at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia — hides a technical secret worthy of respect:
its Control and Data Acquisition System (CDAQ) for the Internal Target Station (ITS) runs on FreeBSD.
⚙️ Why FreeBSD?
The Russian engineers needed a platform that was robust, predictable, and stable, capable of handling:
- continuous data streams from particle detectors;
- remote control of the internal target used in polarized beam experiments;
- integration between legacy industrial hardware and modern network systems.
FreeBSD offered exactly that — especially thanks to ngdp, the Network Graph Data Processing framework built on top of the powerful netgraph(4) subsystem in the BSD kernel.
With it, researchers created a modular architecture where each process — from CAMAC hardware to visualization — connects as a graph of data nodes, transmitting events safely and in real time.
Think of it as a digital particle pipeline.
🧩 Practical impact
The FreeBSD/ngdp system allowed precise monitoring of subtle phenomena such as:
- mechanical vibrations of the moving target (which directly affect collision accuracy);
- timing synchronization of particle beams;
- operational stability during long acceleration cycles.
The result was a high-reliability CDAQ used in critical proton and deuteron polarimetry experiments — later integrated into the broader NICA Collider Project, which aims to recreate the conditions of the universe just moments after the Big Bang.
💡 BSD Where You Least Expect It
While most people associate BSD with servers and routers, here it sits at the core of a particle accelerator, powering experiments that explore the fundamental structure of matter.
A quiet reminder that the Unix we love isn’t just code — it’s scientific culture.
Closing line (for LuxBSD Blog):
“Sometimes, the most stable particle in an experiment… is the operating system.”
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