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Interviews: Ask Physicist Giovanni Organtini About the Possible Higgs Boson Disc
Giovanni Organtini of Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics (well, Instituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) has agreed to answer questions about the recent observations of a particle consistent with the Higgs Boson. Dr. Organtini is part of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. He is careful to note that while the researchers "[believe] that this new particle, with a mass 125 times that of a proton, is the famous Higgs boson," they "need to study that new particle more deeply in the next months to be conclusive on that. Organtini likes free software (he's written Linux device drivers, too) and has his own physics-heavy YouTube channel, mostly in Italian. Please confine questions to one per post, but feel free to ask as many as you'd like.
ATLAS generates 23 petabytes of raw data per second. A large computer cluster near the detector identifies which events to store amounting to 100 megabytes per second which is around 1 petabyte of data per year. (Straight from wikipedia)
The actual analysis of the data requires multiple large computer clusters world wide. I believe the data is available to anyone with the expertise and knowledge required to do any meaningful data analysis. Oh and having a spare cluster sitting around with nothing to do probably helps as well.