CMS Triggers for the LHC Startup

The LHC will collide proton beams at a bunch-crossing rate of 40 MHz. At the design luminosity of $10^{34}$ cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$ each crossing results in an average of about 20 inelastic pp events. The CMS trigger system is designed to reduce the input rate to about 100 Hz. This task is carried out in two steps, namely the Level-1 (L1) and the High-Level trigger (HLT). The L1 trigger is built of customized fast electronics and is designed to reduce the rate to 100 kHz. The HLT is implemented in a filter farm running on hundreds of CPUs and is designed to reduce the rate by another factor of ~1000. It combines the traditional L2 and L3 trigger components in a novel way and allows the coherent tuning of the HLT algorithms to accommodate multiple physics channels. We will discuss the strategies for optimizing triggers covering the experiment`s early physics program.