Information gathering for ATLAS

If the Internet itself was created by the US military to be a redundant, highly-resistant to damage information network, the World Wide Web was created to allow physicists to share data from experiments in subatomic partical physics.

CERN, the birthplace of the WWW, is about to start a series of experiments which will push the boundaries in information gathering, processing and sharing beyond anything ever attempted before. Three-Toed Sloth discuss the incredible engineering work needed for the ATLAS experiments on subatomic particles, and the vast amounts of data the experiments will collect: petabytes -- millions of gigabytes -- per second. Almost twenty years ago, CERN gave us the Web. What will we get in another twenty years?