Sorry, the summary and title is just plain incorrect. This announcement has nothing to do with the Higgs.

A few months ago, CDF claimed that they detected a new particle which could not be the higgs, but was speculated to be a new particle. As explained here, it wasn't possible for the new particle to be the Higgs.

Today DZERO announced that they did not see any signal where CDF claimed to see one. So one of the two projects has an error in their analysis.

More info orig, new announcement, DZERO refutes, another source, even another source

Phoronix released a follow up article that looks a little closer. There is XVideo support but no VA-API, XvBA, or VDPAU. But this article says that there are plans for XvBA and VA-API for the ati drivers, and work is progressing on VA-API support for gallium.

For OpenCL, the classic mesa drivers have no support and no support is planned. But gallium has some support for OpenCL (see mesa/clover), and just today the gallium support for HD 6000 series has been released. So now the HD 6000 has both classic mesa drivers and gallium drivers.

There is a patch for linux to do this called bcache. See LWN article about it.

Here is a blog post with some thoughts about the control room design at the LHC. Here is a picture of the CMS detector control room for comparison. You might also take a look at pictures of the CERN control room for some ideas.

Perhaps you might be interested in the article in the Monad.Reader Issue 13 (warning: pdf) where the TeX language is used to solve the 2008 ICFP programming contest.

He writes a program to control a Mars rover in TeX, it is really impressive. You can even download the source code.