Status of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

The installation of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN is now completed. All magnets are interconnected. Five of the eight machine sectors are cold and filled with liquid helium. The remaining three sectors are in the cooldown phase. All the sectors will be at 1.9 K by mid of July 2008. The hardware commissioning has started in 2006 and three sectors are commissioned up to 5.5 TeV. The start of the beam commissioning is planned for this summer 2008. The paper presents the main milestones towards the beam operation and summarizes the major technical difficulties which were discovered and recovered during the past two years.