Watch This Awesome CERN Animation of Big Data Behind the Super Collider

An impressive infographic style animation shows the vast computer power, including a globe spanning network of data centers, that is needed to filter through the enormous amount of data generated by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. The four major detectors record approximately one petabyte of data per second from the millions of collisions that happen every second -- but none of today's computing systems are capable of handling such rates. The CERN IT team explains the multi-staged process that made it possible to find extremely rare sub-atomic particles like the Higgs boson among the trillions and quadrillions of particles detected anyway. First in line are sophisticated selection systems that are used for a first fast electronic pre-selection, only passing one out of 10,000 events. Tens of thousands of processor cores then select 1% of the remaining events for analysis.

(Video: The Little Big Studio/ CERN IT department )

"Even after such drastic data reduction, the four big experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb, together need to store over 25 petabytes per year. The LHC data are aggregated in the CERN Data Centre, which performs initial data reconstruction is performed, and a copy is archived to long-term tape storage. Another copy is sent to several large data centres around the world. Subsequently hundreds of thousands of computers from around the world come into action: harnessed in a distributed computing service, they form the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG), which provides the resources to store, distribute, and process the LHC data. WLCG combines the power of more than 170 collaborating centres in 36 countries around the world, which are linked to CERN. Every day WLCG processes more than 1.5 million "jobs", corresponding to a single computer running for more than 600 years.