[walrus1066]

Cool stuff.

The computation side of the LHC is really impressive. For a full software trigger, you have 25 nanoseconds in which to load all the raw collision data, reconstruct 100's of particle tracks, calculate their momentum, join them up to figure out their decay vertices etc etc, and then, decide whether to store the event.

I recall LHCb could afford higher trigger-rates than CMS/Atlas, an LHCb event is smaller (~100 kB vs 1 MB for CMS) because the detector only covers 300 milli-radians from the collision-axis, in one direction, whereas CMS/Atlas have full coverage.