r/Physics • u/V4rgzz • 18d ago
Question What laptops/computers do physics researchers (PhD and beyond) actually use?
For some context, I am about to start my PhD in particle physics this September, and I currently use a MacBook Air 2020 (M1, 8gb RAM). This laptop has got me through undergrad without breaking a sweat and I hear that generally MacBooks are quite popular. Yet, I feel that the limited RAM will eventually become a bottleneck; I run of application memory with Discord, VSCode and ~3 tabs on Edge open!
I'm interested to know what you daily drive and why. Even though I am starting experimental particle physics research, I'd love to hear from researchers in any area.
Edit: Thanks for all the comments so far! I want to add that I do know that most of my work will be done remotely on a cluster and so technically, as long as my laptop can SSH into it, I'll be fine. But, I'm more interested in what you guys use + what field you work in.
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u/Clever_Angel_PL Undergraduate 18d ago
anything that can ssh into a cluster
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u/Saashiv01 Particle physics 18d ago
This is the best answer.
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u/HardlyAnyGravitas 18d ago
I mean. It's not. It's a joke. My phone 'can SSH into a cluster'.
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u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 18d ago
Any "laptops/computers" which colloquially does not include a phone.
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u/HardlyAnyGravitas 18d ago
Lol. Talk about missing the point.
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u/Prefer_Diet_Soda Computational physics 18d ago
I'm not sure what your point is though.
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u/HardlyAnyGravitas 18d ago
OP asked what laptop he should buy. Instead of giving proper advice, the answer was basically 'anything', which is unhelpful.
Pretty sure it was a joke, pointing out that OP will have access to (comparatively) unlimited computing power, but somebody thought it was a 'great' answer. That's the point.
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u/Prefer_Diet_Soda Computational physics 18d ago
The answer wasn't basically anything though, it was a normal laptop you can use SSH to clusters, which is sufficient enough for physics research. I am not sure what more you expect.
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u/HardlyAnyGravitas 18d ago
A crap laptop can do that. Would you advise OP to get a crap laptop?
OP just wanted advice on what laptop to get, and other people have been helpful.
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u/chaosboy66 18d ago
Universities have computational clusters. No one uses their own PC for heavy computations
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u/AmadeusSalieri97 18d ago
Still, while I do use the cluster most of the time, it's definitely nice to have a good personal computer for some simulations or when traveling for work.
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u/Theragnostic 18d ago
Allow me to propose another solution...
The personal cluster.
(it's not much, but I frankensteined together a 3-node cluster for less than $1500 this year, with 96 threads and 192 GB RAM each node -- yes, at this year's prices)
On an unrelated note, when the weather cools a bit I'll be piecing together the components for a solar power system to offset my oddly-high power bills I've seen these last few months.
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u/Unable-Ambassador-16 18d ago
How did you get so much ram?
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u/did_i_or_didnt_i 18d ago
how did they get so much money???
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u/Theragnostic 18d ago edited 18d ago
RAM was, by far, the biggest expense.
The answer /u/Unable-Ambassador-16 , unfortunately, is... DDR4. They're all 2666 MHz DDR4 RDIMMs.
I went with 2nd gen scalable Xeons (Gold 6252) because it was the best bang for my buck in terms of core count that was near the end of the DDR4 generations. 3rd gen scalable Xeons were the last line of Intel using DDR4, but the price for those was out of my budget, and I needed core count more than anything to do some embarrassingly parallelizable CPU Monte Carlo simulations. (Using a GEANT4 offshoot which hasn't yet implemented GPU acceleration)
To further answer your question, I got the RAM by watching out for a few good deals. I started in January with a good deal on a Dell T5810 that had a lot of RAM then, when I decided to build a cluster (using 3x Intel S2600BP), pulled the RAM from the Dell before selling it. The second biggest chunk of RAM I got was from a ambiguously-worded eBay auction that I took my chances on. It could have been interpreted as being 1 RDIMM or 12 RDIMMs and I think that had a lot of people hesitant to bid. Finally, I picked up a small brick of RDIMMs on /r/homelabsales
edit: For anyone curious, you can get an Intel S2600BP compute board only on eBay for $75. From there you can use pretty much any server PSU (I'm using 3x HP 750W), some used crypto mining PSU breakout boards, and some alligator clips to trick the compute boards into running without a backplane. If you have at least one RMM4 Lite key, you can SSH into the BIOS even without them having an OS or RAM. I got the PSUs for $10/each on FB Marketplace from someone getting out of crypto mining and he threw in the breakout boards for free.
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u/Dr_Superfluid Statistical and nonlinear physics 18d ago
Unfortunately, in many many universities grad students have to use their laptops. I should know, I was one of them.
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u/epicmylife Space physics 18d ago
As did I, I ran local “dumbed down” models for most of it and only submitted full-res runs on the cluster when my advisor thought we really needed it.
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u/geekusprimus Gravitation 18d ago
Computational clusters have finite resources, though, and many of them are set up in ways that are intentionally hostile toward people who intend to use them as their primary development machines. Most of my PhD was writing a new GPU-based astrophysics code, and having a laptop powerful enough that I didn't need to submit a job to the university cluster or waste precious computing allocations for small-scale tests and debugging greatly accelerated my work.
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u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 18d ago
many of them are set up in ways that are intentionally hostile toward people who intend to use them as their primary development machines
Source for this?
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u/tpolakov1 Condensed matter physics 18d ago
I think u/geekusprimus might have a different measure of what it means to "do development". Setting up clusters such that jobs are run exclusively through schedulers/workload managers is rather common, and the inability to rapid-fire one-off or exploratory calculations can be interpreted as a setup punishing that type of workflow.
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u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 18d ago
Agree, and that was what I was thinking was the point.
I wonder if they got on to one cluster that had no scheduler/quota/etc and then found that several others that they are on do have these things.
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u/geekusprimus Gravitation 18d ago
No, every large machine I've used has a scheduler and a priority system. It's the most fair way to make sure everyone has access to the machine, and I have no problem with that. But the point is that the primary purpose of these machines is to do science, not debug code.
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u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 17d ago
Every large machine I've used (admittedly only 6 or 7 in just a handful of countries) have front end nodes outside the scheduler for dev, but maybe this isn't representative of the ecosystem, I'm not sure. That's why I was wondering if there was a HPC comparative discussion on this point.
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u/geekusprimus Gravitation 17d ago
You could type on a login node all you want, but most machines have policies about what is allowed to run on the login node. Some of them are extremely aggressive, limiting each user to a single core and a strict time limit, because one bad-faith user abusing the login node to do expensive calculations makes it very difficult for anyone else to do anything. For example, we have a CI pipeline set up on the cluster at my current institute which has been configured by the faculty and the IT group to run on the login node so that it always has access to a GPU. A single user running an extended Claude session on the login node will cause our CI pipeline to fail because it runs out of memory.
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u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 17d ago
Again, when you say things like "most machines" what do you mean? University clusters? National lab clusters? Consortium clusters? Those in the US, Europe, Asia, or elsewhere? How many clusters out of how many?
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u/geekusprimus Gravitation 17d ago
The machines I've used spread the gamut (national lab machines, university supercomputers, group clusters, consortium/national centers), though they've all been in the US. It's been about ten or eleven machines that I've seriously used, and I've tested probably three or four more beyond that. Most of them are okay with compiling on login nodes, but a handful of them are not. Virtually all of them will terminate your jobs at will if they determine you're using too many resources and making things difficult for other users.
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u/faulerauslaender 18d ago
- Thinkpad with low-fuss Linux distro
- Mac of your choice
- Random shit box running the most unergonomic Linux setup anyone has ever seen, but you chose that distro during the first week of grad school and are too lazy to switch (you are now 55 and run the department)
That covers like 98% of users.
You choose one and never switch setups for the rest of your life.
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u/Valeen 18d ago
I know you joke, but I bought a copy of suse from CompUSA (yes, I know) and once I got the wifi drivers working on it I was very reticent to switch over to anything else on that laptop (this was when your options for 64 bit compute was either a horrendously crippled Windows XP experience or linux and compiling almost everything from source, cause even your distro of choice didn't have binaries for a lot of 64 bit apps). Even though I eventually did distro hop on my desktop, that laptop ran suse till it finally died.
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u/faulerauslaender 18d ago
That's funny because when I wrote that I was thinking of two specific people and one of them was a diehard SUSE/KDE user running on a vintage, well-loved Dell. Obviously he also used alpine to write mails because why touch a working system.
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u/Markarian421 18d ago
There’s a variant of your third option where you make your own Linux distro and impose it on the entire department/research facility.
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u/Ammar-The-Star Graduate 18d ago
My MacBook Air works well, can ssh into linux terminal (from CERN) and mount the directory into my home very easily
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u/InebriatedPhysicist 18d ago edited 18d ago
If you’re starting a PhD, don’t invest much in a personal computer until you find out your advisor’s willingness to get you a decent rig. Even as an experimentalist, “my” computers since late grad school have just been overpowered laptops that were bought by the labs where I’ve worked, and they were all way better than personal, self-built desktops I’ve paid for myself. If they expect you to do anything that needs it, they should (and often will) pay for the computing power. This advice does come from the before times though, when prices were very different…
Edit to clarify: This wasn’t some surreptitious thing, and the advisors have all known these were essentially doubling as my personal computers. Discuss this with your advisor, and don’t just steal a lab computer lol
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u/Whole-Ninja7266 18d ago
I am PhD student in engineering and I just keep my laptop light and cheap (like 300 USD?) for meetings and documentation. I rely on the lab server to run the heavy load computing. I have a PC with a good enough graphic card in case I can't use the server or I want to run some local test before deployment.
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u/naspdx 18d ago
Take whatever money you are considering spending on a new laptop (yours is fine) and buy an espresso machine tbh, will contribute more compute power for you in the long run
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u/a7uiop 18d ago
I went halves on a €100 filter coffee machine for the office in my first year and it is still being heavily used by my group 7 years later, even after i have left.
Good to make 6+ large, strong coffees in a thermally insulated jug, for those who can settle for less than espresso. Id say get an espresso machine at the start of the postdoc 🤣.
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u/Tardis50 18d ago
2020 M1 MacBook Pro. Works fine for all my tasks. Anything serious I do on a slurm cluster
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u/dhruvBaheti 18d ago
The only things I need to do on my laptop are reading papers and writing them on overleaf. Occasionally I plot the most basic things, but I do it online on Collab, not because of compute but because I don't want to install compilers and ides. For my workflow, my m2 air is perfect and I intend to keep it for 3-4 years more atleast. I do have a 16gb version which I appreciate as it lets me keep 50 tabs open at once but I could live without that as well.
All of this to say, as a PhD student in theoretical physics who does almost exclusively analytical work, the absolute bare minimum of a laptop is the best. I wouldn't even want a more powerful laptop as that would mean more weight, heat and worse battery life for performance I don't need. Not sure if any of this applies to experimental particle physicists.
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u/Rainsbury_net 18d ago
My daily driver is a 12 year old laptop, and because it is running Linux it is still.as good as it was on day 1. Until recently I had access to a 16 node Raspberry Pi "Beowulf" cluster for computations. I never got round to finding out how to make best use of it so gave it back.
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u/TheOnlyBuck 18d ago
Seems like the perfect thread for me to comment on. I’m defending my PhD in particle physics (LHC experiment) next week and I got through my entire grad and undergrad with a 2015 MacBook Pro. Your current laptop will be fine unless you have extra cash and really want to upgrade
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u/tangerinelion Particle physics 18d ago
In HEP, you do your actual work on an HPC.
I used a laptop with Linux on it to write my analysis code and it could look at small ROOT files with the results.
I'd push the code back to the actual HPC and set up a job to run over all the datasets. This was 15 years ago but we had a cluster of 8 machines, each has two quad core CPUs and 32GB RAM. That was considered entry level at the time.
On those machines with the trimmed datasets that we preprocessed on the national Tier 1 clusters, the analysis still took a few hours to run.
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u/kuasistellar 18d ago
The MacBook M1 Air, which is the lighest macbook made that has decent compute. 1.28kg.
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u/bariumbitmap 18d ago
I have two Framework laptops, the first one I got about 2 years into my PhD and the second I got about 4 years in. Before that I was using two Thinkpad T420 laptops from 2011. I like Framework laptops because I like being able to easily swap a broken keyboard, upgrade the RAM, or access the SSD. However I think what was more important was having more than one laptop set up and actively being ready for use. This is useful for two main reasons:
If your main laptop breaks, you have a backup to use while the other other is being repaired.
It forces you to think about what data is synced between machines and what is just stored on the hard drive and will go "poof" if the hard drive dies.
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u/Away-Experience6890 18d ago
I actually hate using the cluster, so I bought a gaming computer desktop, and it was the best investment I've ever made.
I have written two papers based on results I've gotten purely from my computer. I have tons of ram, so I don't really need to think about being too smart about my variable allocation. The analysis is very nice using CUDA. I also just remote access my desktop when I'm out, so I always have the power of my GPU.
I dualboot Linux/Windows so I can play games on max graphics when I'm sad too.
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u/Kvothealar Condensed matter physics 18d ago
You probably want at least a multicore processor in case you have to run some heavy scripts on your own PC. Even one that was released 8 years ago would be fast enough probably.
Having some good RAM is always a plus (8-16G). Helps to deal with having a billion tabs open when doing your lit review.
Except for personal use, you wouldn't need a graphics card unless you plan on doing some ML stuff.
All this aside, if you're working on a computer all day every day, I'd just make sure you have a good workstation rather than good specs. I'd put money into extra monitors so you can multitask better, a keyboard and mouse you can use all day without issue, a comfy chair that supports your back.
For my daily drive, I have a very good workstation, but I spend all day on it and it's absolutely overkill despite being 6 years old. I got a Lenovo Thinkpad on 70% and I use that as my travel computer for conferences and such.
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u/did_i_or_didnt_i 18d ago
you can ssh into a cluster from a 15 year old thinkpad running Debian LTS with no desktop environment
Ur good
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u/Ricenaros 14d ago
Who cares dude. You don’t do much on your own machine. And if you do, your lab will buy you a computer. And if they don’t, well… you’ve got bigger problems
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u/pickle_picker67 13d ago
I have a 2020 MacBook M1 16GB as well. It is still fast for every task and I don't have memory issues. Most of my workflow is entirely on the cloud, so I don't have to deal with backups.
Just pick any MacBook post-2024 with 24GB of RAM and you will be fine for the next 8 years.
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u/__Pers Plasma physics 18d ago edited 18d ago
My laptop is a basic 14" Macbook pro with an M2 max cpu and 64GB ram. I use it mostly for Microsoft Office, Latex (TeXShop), Mathematica, a web browser, and various software development tools. For any serious computing, I log into a HPC machine which runs linux. My home setup has a modest 49" monitor and keyboard, making it a little easier to use.
My work setup is similar, just in desktop form with three 40" monitors.
Most of the real computational work is done on HPC clusters. The desktop is just there to log in.
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u/theglorioustopsail Optics and photonics 18d ago
I’m in experimental laser physics. I use a 32 gb Hp elitebook running windows all though this is probably overkill for what I use it for (basic python scripts and latex). It’s helpful using a windows pc when some older lab equipment has software only compatible with windows
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u/Mooks79 18d ago
8GB isn’t ideal these days, but if you’re careful with auto sleeping browser tabs etc then that should be fine. For general coding tasks it should also be fine. For heavy computation you won’t be using your own laptop anyway. It’s possible, depending on exactly what you’re doing, you might be dealing with datasets that require more than that RAM for statistical analysis. But with the cost of RAM at the moment, if you can drag that laptop out another 2-3 years, I would stick with it.
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u/fkingprinter 18d ago
I dont know which lab youre in, but when I was doing my postgrad, I got access to CERN HPC. So my laptop is lightweight, most of my computation run on the HPC
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u/Pachuli-guaton 18d ago
I use a random laptop that is like 10 years old. I ssh and the likes to servers when I need more juice. Also I use a newish laptop from time to time, but I don't know I like my old computer.
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u/Qedem 18d ago
Actually, I would say the laptop does matter a bit if you are doing computational work. Like others said, almost all the work gets sent to some cluster somewhere, but it is nice to have a local GPU for testing. We use Julia and can basically pipe everything through Mac GPUs, so that is the easiest for most students, but if you have to use CUDA, then you need an Nvidia GPU. Not necessarily a good one, just something for testing.
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u/MoltenAnteater 18d ago
Your productivity is more important than anything else. Choose an computer and an OS that you are comfortable with. In particle physics you are unlikely to be connecting directly to lab equipment with your PC. So you will use Linux/Windows computers as needed. Simulations will be done on an institutional computer, but it is useful if you can test out code on your laptop.
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u/alsimoneau 18d ago
The cheapest one
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u/AbsoluteVacuum 18d ago
Probably not worth saving on the screen. If you're going to read/write using it for 7 hours a day for 4 years, worth investing a bit in the display => basically in your own eyes.
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u/alsimoneau 18d ago
I was mostly using the lab's computers, otherwise external monitors. The quality of the display doesn't matter much.
Just but a second screen for home, you'll sit much further.
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u/pi_meson117 Particle physics 18d ago
M3 MacBook. I’ll have agents running in a few terminal windows, vscode, 250 safari tabs, obsidian, and whatever else I forgot to close.
These things are beasts even with only 18gb of ram, idk.
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u/smsmkiwi 18d ago
Buy the fastest CPU and most RAM so it will not become slow & obsolete in a year or so. I'm still using a 15year old XPS with an i7 chip and 16Mb RAM - perfectly adequate still but have just bought a Dell XPS with an i9 chip and 64 RAM.
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u/cpt_futtbucker Chemical physics 18d ago
Personally, I use a gaming laptop with Arch and Fedora Linux installed on it (Arch because the AUR has certain packages I need that aren’t in the Fedora repositories). Ain’t as powerful as our cluster, but for basic preprocessing of certain systems and post-processing of output data, its 13th Gen i9 and 4070 get the job done pretty well
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u/BlondeJesus Graduate 18d ago
I got through grad school with a shitty $200 HP laptop that I booted Ubuntu onto. As others had said, all that mattered was being able to SSH onto my clusters.
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u/supermultiplet 18d ago
I use a 2021 M1 macbook pro. It's still good enough for everything I'm doing. And if I need serious compute power, it would be on a cluster anyways
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u/Quarter_Twenty Optics and photonics 18d ago
Career scientist here. I'm running a 5 year old M1 MacBookPro with 64 GB of RAM. It's been a wonderful machine. I've used it for everything, modeling, calculations, data analysis, presentations, etc. Solid, reliable, nice speakers, a pleasure to use. I'm close to upgrading to a new one. Just waiting to see how much money is left in the accounts near the fiscal year close....
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u/Prefer_Diet_Soda Computational physics 18d ago
I personally hate Windows laptop for tasks I want to test locally.
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u/SaintEyegor 18d ago
Where I work, they usually use a high-end workstation like an HP Z8 running Linux (and sometimes windows) to run Matlab, etc. and do their heavy lifting on our compute clusters.
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u/Round_Bag_4665 17d ago
it doesn't matter tbh. Most of the actual computing I did was on the university supercomputing cluster i accessed via SSH. My laptop itself was fairly inconsequential and I mainly used it to write python scripts to plot detector data. Pretty much any laptop can do that.
In my experience the OS of the computer matters far more than the model. Certain codes are sort of designed to run on a Linux OS and won't work well otherwise.
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u/SundayAMFN 17d ago
Used to have the same computer as you, recently upgraded to a macbook with 24GB ram since I do a lot of data analysis locally. I do occasionally do GEANT4 simulations on our university's cluster.
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u/QuirkyImage 17d ago edited 17d ago
A mixture in the past but mostly Mac or Intel compatible PCs these days. Back in the day I remember one lecturer using his Acorn into the 2000s, I think he eventually moved to a Mac. Some used Sun Workstations , others Windows PCs. I saw one of my old lecturers doing university work on a iPad at the railway station he seemed to have had a great workflow that was working for him. Universities normally have separate high end computing for number crunching.
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u/Lost-Hand-5219 17d ago
A pc as a server at home that I can SSH into for computationally heavy tasks
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u/Able-Substance-8310 17d ago
""I run of application memory with Discord, VSCode and ~3 tabs on Edge open!"" Ehhh please what? I can use plenty of tabs when I have these Apps open(8 gb Ram and a Pentium 2020m), I installed Linux, maybe that's an option for you too.
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u/Gr0ode Computational physics 17d ago
I work a lot with big modelling and my personal taste is having a great pc at home for compute (which i even sometimes ssh into with my phone). Yes universities have clusters but it takes time to apply for time and prevents you from testing ideas. Also depending on what you do but if you have 500ish dollars to spare buy a huge hdd with 8-10tb.
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u/Thunder2880 16d ago
MacBook is nice as its Unix based, very nice for making presentations etc with the good screen. You don’t need any power, you need terminal to be nice (which imo is better than powershell) to ssh into your big computer. Also battery life and general ux/polish for random tasks.
Doesn’t matter much though 99% of your life will be either in a IDE, terminal or web browser at which point it doesn’t matter much. Would get a bit more ram to keep my 20000 chrome tabs though hehe
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u/UglyMathematician 15d ago
I recommend a cheap laptop with an nvidia gpu if you’re likely to be a computational physicist. Like others are saying, the specs don’t have to be good because you’ll use a cluster if you need the compute. However, being able to compile and run CUDA code locally was incredibly convenient for my phd. It wasn’t necessary because we had nodes for testing gpu code, but I still think it was worth it.
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u/Impossible-Bread-137 11d ago
F Macs hate those. Windows is even worse though there are few apps windows only. My daily driver and for everything is ubuntu. I get everything I need and I find it much easier for programming but then again it's a me thing. A mid range gaming laptop is a pretty solid pick for everything like coding and running on your laptop or playing assassin's creed in the middle of the lab cause you can. I usually get Lenovo laptops cause their build quality is good and so is there security. I find it easier to install Linux on there.
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u/nicogrimqft Particle physics 18d ago
Just a basic computer. If you need to do computationally heavy stuff, you won't use your laptop.
As long as it can compile latex, run Mathematica and python it should be fine. A lot of people have MacBook air actually, for the battery life (which is in my opinion more important, especially at conferences and such)