Jeremy Hore and his team are preparing for one of the toughest jobs at the Olympic Games. If they succeed, no one will notice but if they fail, it will hit the headlines.
Hore is the chief integrator at Atos Origin, a Paris-based multinational company that design, build and operate the IT system for the Olympic Games that will relay information - including event results and statistics - to spectators and media around the world in real-time.
"The extremely high visibility of the Games means it is a project on which you don't have a second chance to get it right," said Hore.
"In many company projects, IT designers and operators have a certain level of time flexibility. But in the case of the Olympics, rescheduling is out of the question."
As the worldwide information technology partner of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Atos Origin's association with the Olympic Games started at Salt Lake City 2002 and will extend to London 2012.
Hore said that they usually need 3 1/2 years to complete the Olympic project. For the Beijing Games, the technical infrastructure links more than 60 competition and non-competition venues, consisting of more than 1,000 servers, 10,000 PCs and 1,000 network and security devices.
Despite the "Hi-tech" theme of the Beijing Games, Hore and his team prefer proven and reliable technology as much as possible.
"The overall structure is similar to those used in the past few Olympics," said the 36-year-old Australian.
Nevertheless, Hore admitted that compared with the previous Games, the IT architecture for Beijing 2008 is more complex and difficult to handle due to the unprecedented decentralization of the games. Sports competitions will take place in seven cities, with one-sixth of the venues outside Beijing.
"We will switch to a web-based platform from the old client server-based one to cope with the challenge," said Hore.
To ensure a flawless running of the complex system, Atos Origin started to test every piece of the IT system last November in a testing laboratory at the Beijing Olympic Tower, the headquarters of the local Olympic Organizing Committee (BOCOG).
But the possibility of a technological failure is always there, either triggered by hackers or a natural disaster.
"The key for security is a highly capable monitoring system," said Jiang Sheng, a Chinese IT engineer at Atos Origin.
According to Jiang, system operators in Turin captured 200,000 alarms daily over the 17-day games period.
"We have developed a more efficient processing mechanism for Beijing to better define the real threats among the huge amount of alerts," he said.
"In addition, two backup systems - one in Beijing and the other at a secret location - would be put into operation."
Source: Xinhua
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