The CMS experiment: status, performance and selected results

Preliminary Abstract: The LHC accelerator is rapidly gaining momentum and the experiments, including CMS, are accumulating statistics for data taken at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV. While analyses presented in early summer this year were based on only some 250 inverse nanobarns it is expected that this number will increase by more than two orders of magnitude by the end of the year. An overview of the detector performance and recent technical developments in CMS allowing to keep up with the rapid increase in LHC luminosity will be given and a few selected physics results will be presented.