The Large Hadron Collider booted up for the first time today – a machine that cost a staggering £5 billion to build, required collaboration between thousands of physicists and engineers from 85 countries and is itself so large that it spans two countries. It’s awe inspiring as a whole, but even the computer geekery behind it alone is impressive. So why is everyone missing the point?

The experiment will generate 15 Petabytes of data every year. If you’re unfamiliar with that word, it represents a million Gigabytes. All that data will first stream into a huge bank of tape drives where it will be lightly processed and passed on down to a group of several large data centres. Below this will sit another level of computing clusters with enough processing power to crank through the data for analysis. After that this data will be passed on down to individual machines for access by human eyes.

The whole thing is called the Grid, and there’s nothing else like it. 100,000 CPUs all working together to prove the existence of one tiny theoretical particle.

There’s so much data involved that private fiber optics links have been installed between CERN and other academic institutions. The whole endeavour is enormous, and that’s just the data storage. Imagine the scale of the actual machinery itself. It’s fascinating.

Or if that doesn’t impress you, consider the other computers controlling 1,600 super-cooled magnets to the nanosecond in order to accurately guide particles moving at almost the speed of light.

However, what is the media instead focusing on today? That the world still exists. Well done. Breaking news. I realised that shortly after waking up this morning (around ten minutes, I’d say). No particle collisions are even happening yet, and zipping a chunk of Hadrons in a huge circle without bashing them in to anything is unlikely to bring about the apocalypse. Science reporting is in a sad state.