The LHC's computing revolution

Making new discoveries may require writing new software first. Scientists conceived of the Large Hadron Collider and its experiments in 1992. Back then, Apple was starting to figure out the laptop computer, and a CERN fellow named Tim Berners-Lee had just released the code for a pet project called the World Wide Web. "In the days when we started, there was no Google. There was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. All of these companies that tackle big data did not exist," says Graeme Stewart, a CE...