IBMs IT infrastructure has a very public face in the form of the official Olympic Web site. By the end of the Games it will have received an estimated 1.4 billion page views or the equivalent of sever
IBMs IT infrastructure has a very public face in the form of the official Olympic Web site. By the end of the Games it will have received an estimated 1.4 billion page views or the equivalent of several billion hits. Thats about 300 times the volume of traffic seen on the Atlanta Olympic site in 1996.
However, the site is just the public face of the end product, which has required four years of work and about 850 staff in Australia, Spain and the United States to put together. IBM has had to create a massive wide area network that links several local area networks covering 39 venues in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Queensland (Victoria, South Australia and Queensland are staging Olympic soccer events). This large intranet will provide real time information to the 260,000 officials, media and athletes and eventually to the public through the official site.
IBM has been involved with the Olympic Games since 1993, and covered its first event at Lillehammer in 1994. Since then it has provided the technology behind the 1996 Atlanta games and the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics. In October 1997 the company established the IBM Spain Games Systems Centre (GSC) in Madrid to develop, integrate, test and transport the IT systems to Sydney. About 300 developers and testers in three countries have been involved in putting together the Games System Centre, which has provided the core systems for the Sydney operation.
One of the Centres key roles has been to monitor the quality control process of code development. More than 10 million lines of code have been written for the system, which has required several specialist applications designed to handle the unique demands of the Games operation.
Developers used IBM VisualAge, TeamConnection as well as Lotus Notes and a Domino solution to produce three core information systems: The Games Management System is a suite of interconnected applications that handles the massive logistics of running the Games.
The Results System receives timing and scoring information from the Swiss Timing Ltd equipment at each Olympic Games venue, and manages the competition, calculates results and distributes them in real time to the scoreboard, television and to other applications.
The Central Results System, which uses a DB2 database on an OS/390 platform capable of handling more than 40,000 documents in real time, receives competition information from 28 sports and 300 medal events. That data is then fed to an application called WNPA which transmits it in high volumes to the World News Press Agencies that in turn processes the data and then delivers it to their own clients in time to meet worldwide press deadlines.
While Press around the world are receiving information from the site, those directly involved with the Olympics are being kept informed through a system called INFO, which IBM describes as the primary information resource for Olympic Family members - athletes, coaches, officials, organisers, and media.
Supported by a DB2 Universal Database and Lotus Domino running on a 'Deep Blue RS/6000 SP servers, INFO is the system that provides athletes with the information on how well their fellow competitors are doing, and makes broadcasters sound knowledgeable by providing everything from news and weather to results and athlete biographies. Those involved in the Olympics are also using it as a secure
email system.
INFO is an enhanced version of the Info 98 Games Information Retrieval System used during the Nagano Olympic Winter Games. It is an intranet-based system that uses Netscape Navigator as its browser interface and is capable of supporting English and French. Apart from current information it also provides historical results of past Olympic Summer Games, World Championships, World Cup and other major qualifying competitions, as well as current rankings, medal and records information, competition and training schedules, as well as information on Opening and Closing Ceremonies, cultural programs, Olympic Village events and medal ceremonies. INFOs news system is able to provide flash quotes from athletes, coaches and officials immediately after sporting events; media conference highlights, event previews and reviews, media communications, sport-specific and general news items. And if athletes and officials want to get anywhere there are transport schedules and information; it even provides information on the birthdays of athletes.
It is being fed into 2,000 workstations and kiosks located in all Game competition and non-competition venues including the Main Press Centre, International Broadcast Centre and venue press centres, and is able to transfer data to the official Web site.
A total of 9,000 workstations and ThinkPads, 540 servers and 845 networks switches have been deployed at the Games and the overall management
tools have been provided by IBMs Tivoli Systems subsidiary.
Tivoli is responsible for software distribution, network management, storage management, distributed monitoring, and performance data collection. It has had to provide a solution that would provide cross-platform integration over multiple platforms. The system also has to be capable of providing automatic software updates for all of the servers and workstations. On top of that it has the critical job of ensuring everything is securely backed up. The system is constantly monitored and support personnel are able to capture and control the screen, keyboard and mouse of a remote PC if necessary.
The Games Results System is made up of two major components: the Central Results System and the Venue Results applications. The Central Results System is a massive data warehouse managed by a DB2 database, hosted by an S/390 Parallel Sysplex server and stored in RAMAC Virtual Array storage devices. It must be accessible 24 hours a day for the 17 days of the Games.