Photos: The Cern computers cracking the Big Bang

The LHC will produce up to 600 million particle collisions per second.

To store the huge amount of data the LHC produces, the centre houses eight petabytes of hard discs and 18 petabytes of magnetic tapes. This will increase to 16 petabytes of disc and 30 petabytes of tape by the end of the year.

Even this is insufficient to store the vast amounts of the raw data produced by the LHC so its four detectors - which each look for different particles and energy signatures - have built-in electronics and smaller computer centres that analyse petabytes of data per second they collect and throw away the bulk of the information not of interest to the physicists.

The data that's left is sent on to the computer centre and its racks of servers, seen here.

Jean Michel Jouanigot, head of network services at Cern, said: "A lot of processors are devoted to data processing for physics. We are collecting a tremendous amount of data from the collision points."

Photo credit: Cern