Beijing 2008 Olympics IT gets ready for the big freeze

How the tech team prepares for the starter's pistol…

With less than 100 days remaining before the start of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, work on the IT systems to support the event is moving into its final phases.

The team members behind the IT systems are preparing to move from their individual project roles to the operational phase, and part of that is bringing software development to a close. Follow this link for photos of some of the Beijing venues and IT infrastructure that will underpin them.

Atos Origin is the worldwide IT partner for the Olympic Games, overseeing the infrastructure which features 10,000 PCs, 1,000 servers and 5,000 results systems terminals, as well as a suite of applications for managing the games and publishing the results of events. Jeremy Hore, chief integrator for the games, is the man who has to make sure all the bits fit together.

Hore told silicon.com: "Right now we are freezing the software, which means basically no more changes."

"We freeze on a sport-by-sport basis. It's not a small competition and so the impact of a [software] change might be good for one person but bad for 25 other people. If we keep accepting changes to the system we would not be ready operationally. At a certain time we have to go to operations and say we only do changes that are very important," he explained.

He said: The team is also moving from developing to operating the technology. "Everyone works in their own group with their own technology and now we are going from the project roles to operational roles. It's quite a different mindset for people to go from project to operational."

In the second half of May comes the final deployment of hardware to the 70 venues. The IT team has made a few changes since the Athens games - for example hardware is all now preconfigured before it goes to the venues.

Hore added: "We've expanded our use of open source because it's good and reliable and low cost and if something works we expand and do more with it."

He also points to the security monitoring as one area where the IT systems are particularly advanced: "The Olympic Games is a very visible event so security is taken very seriously from the beginning of the project."

Around 30 to 40 of the team have experience with previous Olympic games, while the rest are hired locally - around 180 project team and 400 for the ops team. The team has already had one technical rehearsal, at the end of April.

"The first technical rehearsal was very good. We had 30 sports and it was done mostly in the labs because the venues weren't ready for the technology. We have the second in June when we will have almost all the venues involved and many more people involved - and other areas like transport management to make it as close to the Olympic Games as you can come from a technical point of view," he said.

Integration is what the team in Beijing is doing most of the time, including project management, systems architecture and design, integration testing and IT security. And lots and lots of testing, with applications tested at the load expected during the games and then again with the load sometimes increased by 10 times to see if it can support it. Hore said: "We consider testing to be one of the key success factors; I'm not sure if you can ever do too much testing."

And Hore has some advice for organisations that have projects which have to hit their deadlines: "If the deadline is important you have to be very rigorous and strict around changes. We have no choice we have to be ready so everything takes second place to the deadline. Integrate across the project as often as possible and as early as possible."