Evaluating real-time data at CERN

In May 2024, I interned at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. It was incredible to see the machines up close and explore the ATLAS, ALICE, CMS, and LHCb experiments. Walking on the soil of CERN was surreal. The engineering behind accelerating particles to nearly light speed is very interesting. It is probably the most complex thing humans have ever built and it almost seems like magic. ATLAS especially impressed me. It is massive, and the precision required to detect particles from high-energy collisions is incredible. I spent time in the control rooms watching physicists monitor experiments in real-time. The data processing is insane. They're filtering through petabytes of collision data to find rare events that might reveal new physics. The computational power required for this must be enormous. I even had the opportunity to analyze raw live data from the LHC experiment and classify the particles by their trajectories in each detector. CERN's computing infrastructure is one of the largest in the world. Seeing this has really changed the way I think about what is possible.