Budapest Data 2015

Experiments at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) generate colossal amounts of data. Physicists must sift through about 30 petabytes of data produced annually in their search for new particles and interesting physics. The tidal wave of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN places an unprecedented challenge for experiments' data acquisition systems, and it is the need to select rare physics processes with high efficiency while rejecting high-rate background processes that drives the architectural decisions and technology choices. Although filtering and managing large data sets is of course not exclusive to particle physics, the approach that has been taken is somewhat unique. In this talk, I will describe the typical journey taken by data from the readout electronics of one experiment to the results of a physics analysis.