Beijing Olympics primed to break sports and IT records

Technology infrastructure master plan foresees unprecedented range of services

Each sport has its own section at the Atos Origin testing lab

The Beijing Olympics are the most IT-enabled yet, with 4,000 IT staff ­ compared with 3,600 in Athens four years ago ­ managing venues across cities up to 2,340km apart.

The event will attract four million spectators and an estimated four billion television viewers. It has produced a 200,000-strong “Olympic Family” that includes, as well as judges and coaches, 10,500 athletes and 21,600 accredited media representatives.

The 1,000-server IT infrastructure is based on an IT master plan defined in February 2005. The project milestones have included:

March 2005 ­ the integration testing strategy; July 2005 ­ the master system architecture; December 2006 ­ information security architecture; January 2007 ­ hardware configuration freeze; November 2007 ­ multi-sport and system testing.

This is the first time international broadcasters will be able to receive remote access to real-time competition data from their own country, via the Commentator Information System (CIS), a Java-based application that dispatches results around the world instantaneously.

Broadcasters will have information before they hear the roar of the crowd, said Jeremy Hore, Atos Origin’s chief integrator for the project.

“We have much more real-time data than we have ever had before,” he said.

“US broadcaster NBC, for example, will have commentator information providing the same experience as if it was in Beijing.”

CIS is part of the Information Diffusion Systems (IDS), which manage print distribution, results data feeds to news agencies and internet customers, and Info 2008, an intranet for the Olympic Family.

Info 2008 will be run across 5,000 terminals, and Atos Origin expects more than one million hits a day during the 17 days of the games.

The intranet will be available via a wireless network for the first time, providing a range of services such as news, athlete profiles, medal tables and weather information from the Chinese Meteorological Bureau supplied in Chinese, English and French.

Alongside IDS, Atos Origin has built the Games Management Systems (GMS), which deal with everything from accreditations and qualifications to information, transportation and services for VIPs.

Atos Origin worked with the Organising Committee of the Olympic Games to co-ordinate a major IT programme which generated 200,000 hours of testing. Launched three years before the start of the Games, it incorporates more than 50 applications from around the world.

The whole IT infrastructure has inbuilt security, based on risk management, and provides mechanisms such as anti-virus software as well as intrusion detection systems. The system is responsible for preventing viruses, hacking and any disruptions to the games or the distribution of information.

It is all supported by security policies and procedures for which all IT staff have been trained. During the Games, the IT security team will be operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to ensure there is no interruption to the event.

The 2008 Games are widely touted to be the greenest ever. “We see green IT as part of our corporate social responsibility, and not just for the Olympic Games. It is a permanent part of our work,” said Patrick Adiba, executive vice president of Olympic Games and major events at Atos Origin.

“We use less paper thanks to remote systems and run more applications on fewer servers. And I’m sure London 2012 will take the next step.”

Atos Origin is working with nine technology partners, including Omega for timing and scoring, Samsung for wireless communications equipment, China Mobile for mobile telecommunications and Chinese provider Sohu.com for the internet.

The Beijing 2008 web site is expected to far exceed the 11.3 billion hits recorded on the Sydney 2000 Games site. Atlanta 1996, the first Olympic Games web site, attracted 189 million hits. Since then, virtual visitors to the Winter Olympics in Nagano exceeded 630 million.

“In our daily lives we can feel the effects of the hi-tech aspects of the Olympics,” said Sun Weide, deputy director of the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games.
“It is the first time Beijing residents will be able to use mobile phones underground.”