In about 240 days, the world will witness a technological miracle disguised as a sporting event. It will be the largest, most technically complex athletic orgy in history. And, while athletes will rightfully bask in global admiration, one vital participant?a fierce competitor in its own right?will receive no medal and no ovation, though it will decidedly deserve both.
The Olympic flame will be rekindled at the Centennial Games in Atlanta next July. What the estimated 3.5 billion worldwide viewers will see of IBM are its commercial images filling the spaces between events. But, in truth, IBM's involvement is of a scale and sophistication that defies belief. It will be the technological Atlas, holding the Olympic Games on its shoulders, and it cannot afford to shrug.
Meeting the Challenge
IBM's challenge will be
? To network 37 venues spread across four southern states and Washington, D.C.
? To capture and calculate the results of 271 medal events.
? To distribute the data to broadcasters, media, and thousands of network users.
? To do so flawlessly and instantaneously.
IBM's solution provides an innovative client/server implementation of a network-centric design.
Hardware requirements will have IBM dusting off roughly its entire product line. S/390 mainframes will control initial data distribution and network management. Seventy-four AS/400s, a primary and a backup at each competition site, will broadcast results to 6,000 PS/2 workstations on 250 LANs. Wireless LANs will be used in remote, temporary sites where stringing cable is impractical.
AS/400s will also provide E-mail capability, bulletin boards, athlete's bios, scheduling, and multilanguage support to competitors and staff. Additional midrange systems will support the sizable business and administrative activities of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG). Finally, IBM's Scaleable POWER-parallel system and an RS/6000 will act as web servers for those entangled in the Internet, making these the first online Olympics.
If the Olympic flag depicts an integration of continents and cultures, IBM's Olympic implementation will be the standard of technological integration. The high-tech panoply will include wireless communication, multimedia, touchscreen displays, biometric handprint scanners, radio frequency security badges, pen-based systems, and satellite feeds. Since IBM doesn't manufacture all the tchotchkes necessary to support an Olympiad, it will also be responsible for the seamless integration of equipment from Kodak, Swatch Timing, Xerox, AT&T, Bell South, Motorola, Scientific Atlanta, and Sensomatic.
The AS/400 and RS/6000 supported Atlanta's preparations long before the Olympic flame was due to reignite General Sherman's favorite town. A suite of AS/400-based business, financial, and human resources applications braced the billion-dollar operations of ACOG. The system's imaging capabilities accelerated the sorting and selection of the 40,000 volunteers who will staff the Games. Over 500,000 applications were scanned into the system, which quickly identified those candidates with desirable language and technical skills.
The RS/6000 was used in the design and construction of several Olympic facilities. IBM, however, exploited the system's capabilities beyond support for computer-aided design (CAD). The RS/6000 became the major physical planning tool for the Olympiad, used creatively as a communications and learning tool. With IBM's 3D Interaction Accelerator, a virtual reality-ish software product, the RS/6000 permitted broadcasters, security officials, and facilities managers to "walk through" venues prior to their completion.
Viewer sight lines, camera placements, cabling paths, security assignments, crowd control, and dozens of other issues could be addressed prior to the physical completion of individual venues. When some 500 representatives from 200 National Organizing Committees descended on Atlanta to view the progress of the new 85,000-seat Olympic stadium, they were invited to "walk through" the facility online. They not only received a much more intimate and detailed inspection of the building than ongoing construction would allow, but they were also given a videotape of the tour that they could take home and share with their colleagues.
Let the Games Begin
Here's how it will all work once the competition starts. Let's say the 100-meter run has just been completed and six guys have burst across the finish line in a blur of legs and torsos. A Swatch Timing device sits on the finish line and untangles the winner. It passes its information to a PS/2, which performs further calculations, if necessary, then passes the data to the S/390. The PC also forwards results directly to the Commentator Information System, which supports broadcasters and updates scoreboards. Broadcasters are linked to a closed-cable television network that allows them to choose any of nine channels covering the most viewed sports in other venues. A touchscreen system, fed by AS/400s at those sites, provides information on the events and athletes. As a consequence, commentators are able to expound on multiple events from a single location.
As results are verified by officials, the S/390 distributes them to online news agencies and notifies the local AS/400 server, which executes a client/server transaction to update its database. The server then distributes the data to AS/400s at other competition sites. The AS/400s, in turn, make the information available to the 6,000 network clients and to kiosks with touchscreen displays that allow customers and participants to view event results, athlete biographies, schedules, and transportation options. Full-motion video is available to replay photo finishes, and hard copies of AS/400-resident data can be printed on one of 2,000 network printers.
Event results are also beamed to an orbiting satellite, which retransmits them to a paging device distributed to media members. The device has a serial connector that plugs into any personal computer and eliminates the need to transcribe competition outcomes, while protecting the integrity of the network.
The results-tracking software package has evolved from the 1984 Sarajevo games through the most recent Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, and it has been newly modified for Atlanta. Systems software includes DB2 and CICS implementations that exist on all platforms. Data storage capacity on the network eclipses 3 terabytes (trillion bytes) of data.
Swifter, Higher, Stronger, and More Expensive
The Olympics are one of the few institutions swimming against prevailing downsizing currents. The per-minute cost of staging the event approaches the equivalent interest payment on the national debt. The last records available are for Lillehammer, where the much smaller Winter Olympics cost $50,154 per minute.
As the Games draw nearer, interested Internet users can access the 1996 Olym-pic Games Home Page at http://www.atlanta.org. Nine categories of information are available, including the official program?with times, dates, and locations of events?and ticket and travel information.
Citius, Altius, Fortius?swifter, higher, stronger?is the motto of the Olympics. And the prospect of athletes miraculously squeezing seconds, inches, and pounds from the record books keeps us coming back. Perhaps IBM's backroom benefaction can be measured by the same standards. Since the inaugural computerized Olympics in Rome in 1960, IBM has contributed swifter processors, higher standards of excellence, and stronger technologies in support of this singular event.
That is a worthy reflection of the intellectual records set by its employees. It's what keeps Big Blue's customers coming back, and it's a fine Olympic legacy in its own right.
Victor Rozek has 17 years of experience in the data processing industry, including seven years with IBM in Operations Management and Systems Engineering.
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