@Pete
> Does anyone know if I can visit CERN and see the boffins at work for myself
Yup.
http://outreach.web.cern.ch/outreach/en/Visits/Intro-en.html
Do drop in.
2 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Oct 2007
In fact, all data from the detectors is filtered in real time using custom silicon or FPGAs. Typically, only about one in every 400,000 measurements is kept, the rest just disappears off the end of FIFOs in buffers. For the detector I happen to know about, we record a few MB, 40M times per second; but only about 400MB/s make it onto tape.
Some of the FPGA-based systems used to process the data are quite impressive; few Tb/s flowing through a single electronics crate and being processed within a microsecond or so, that sort of level.