Particle accelerators must discard 99 percent of their data in real time
The Large Hadron Collider generates data at an overwhelming rate of one petabyte per second, forcing physicists to use real-time AI to permanently delete nearly all observations before they are ever recorded.
Modern particle accelerators produce data at such staggering rates that recording every event is physically and economically impossible. At the Large Hadron Collider, the ATLAS detector generates roughly one petabyte of raw data every second, yet storage limitations allow for only 0.0001 percent of that information to be permanently saved. To manage this deluge, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory are developing edge AI algorithms embedded directly into low-power analog computing hardware at the detector's trigger system.