Small particles, big data

Prof. Dr. Ben Kilminster, Universität Zürich

In order for particle physicists to announce the discovery of the Higgs boson, they had to distill unprecedentedly large data sets, collected at extraordinary rates, into a single yes/no answer.  Hidden from view are the vast, globally distributed computing systems, networks, and software that they used to calculate this answer. In this talk, I will reveal how particle physicists took a petabyte (a thousand million megabytes) of data collected each second for a year, and using computing techniques, told the world confidently that they had made a fundamental discovery about the nature of the universe. And don’t worry, I’ll keep it light – no physics background required!