The CMS silicon strip tracker performance using cosmic ray data

The CMS Silicon Strip Tracker (SST) is the largest tracking system based on silicon detector technology ever built for high energy physics experiments. It consists of 24,244 single-sided micro-strip sensors for a total active area of 198 m2 and about 9.3 million readout channels. The detector was installed inside CMS in December 2007, commissioned during summer 2008 and then it participated along with other subdetector components of CMS in cosmic muons data taking runs. The commissioning strategy, the operational experience and the detector performance results are presented.