The ATLAS level-1 trigger: Status of the system and first results from cosmic-ray data

The ATLAS detector at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be exposed to proton proton collisions from beams crossing at 40 MHz. At the design luminosity of 1034 cm(-2) s(-1) there are on average 23 collisions per bunch crossing. A three-level trigger system will select potentially interesting events in order to reduce the readout rate to about 200 Hz. The first trigger level is implemented in custom-built electronics and makes an initial fast selection based on detector data of coarse granularity. It has to reduce the rate by a factor of 104 to less than 100 kHz. The other two consecutive trigger levels are in software and run on PC farms. We present an overview of the first-level trigger system and report on the current installation status. Moreover, we show analysis results of cosmic-ray data recorded in situ at the ATLAS experimental site with final or close-to-final hardware.