Some Challenges in Particle Physics Data

Experimental Particle Physics attempts to understand the most basic constituents of matter and the forces that act upon them. The research is carried out at National and Multinational Laboratories such as Fermilab and CERN by large international collaborations. The next generation of experiments will produce data at a rate of 40TByte/s which will be reduced with real time hardware. The resulting 800Gb/s data stream will then be processed in real time with a 10**6 MIPs computer clusted and reduced to Terabytes of data per day which will subsequently be analyzed "Offline". Each step in the process involves the statistical analysis of the data to search for the signatures of interesting (but possibly unanticipated) physics.