The Bits and Bytes of Beijing's Olympic Games Build Up
Thu, October 11, 2007
CIO Asia — The world's attention will focus on Beijing over the next 12 months in the lead up to the Games of the XXIX Olympiad. The city is busily finishing the construction of the major event venues, like the Bird's Nest and Water Cube, where the opening ceremony and swimming events will be showcased. While the Chinese capital is developing trendy and high-tech building architecture, the IT infrastructure that will support the world's greatest sporting event is being based on more conservative and established systems.
Wireless networks, radio frequency identification (RFID) and biometric scans may not be dominant, but, according to the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) and its hardware supplier Lenovo, reliability has a far higher priority than cutting-edge technologies. As the world turns its attention towards next year's staging of more than 300 different events, all happening within 17 days, the IT systems that support the 2008 Olympics cannot afford any failure nor downtime, notes Hou Xinyi, deputy director, technology department of BOCOG.
Back to Basics
Despite the endorsement of conservative technologies, the scale of IT infrastructure is massive. Therein lies the challenge. According to Hou, the Olympics IT infrastructure consists of 17 data centers, hosting 900 servers, both Intel-based PC servers and Unix servers, are all connected by 1,500 data network switches and routers. On the user-front, there will be 12,000 desktop computers and 3,000 desktop printers installed.
This hardware supports the software architecture, managed by the IT services partner Atos Origin. The four major applications are the game management system (GMS), the information diffusion system (IDS), the on-venue results (OVR) and the timing and scoring system.
The GMS enables the operation of the event venues, including athletes' accreditation, transportation and medical services arrangements, as well as staffing information. The IDS supports the game results announcements, data feed to the press and the commentators.
New and cutting-edge technologies can still be found at event venues, says the hardware sponsor, Lenovo. Alice Li, Lenovo's vice-president of Olympic marketing, says the latest notebooks and laptops, plus wireless network and other newer technologies, can be found at the internet lounges (i-lounge), where visitors and athletes can access the Net.
"The latest technologies, like Vista systems, can be found at the i-lounge. We will also arrange athletes' visits and other activities there," says Li. "But BOCOG has chosen more mature and reliable systems for the operation of the games."
