I just finished watching Particle Fever, which describes the ~30-year path that physicists endured before the confirmation of the Higgs boson particle. Thousands of people spent years of excruciatingly painstaking efforts to confirm one aspect of our reality. Yet there were setbacks (some taking years) and the collider won’t even be operating at full power until 2015 (although the original schedule called for full-power operation in 2008)…
I know (from both colleagues and personal experience) that the efforts from the IT and computational folks backing up these experiments are no less painstaking and mundane. Keeping a single computer operating correctly can be a pain. Keeping hundreds or thousands operating correctly (along with the incredible diversity of dodgy scientific software packages) is basically impossible.