More than 10,000 PCs will be needed for this
summer Games, and if everything goes well, you will not even see them there
2012 Olympics is really a great event. The
main games take place over 17 days, with 26 sports and 300 events spread across
36 places and 58 places where having no competition. Due to huge number of
simultaneous events, the sport requires 10 times the needed technology for the
World Cup soccer. About 10 thousand athletes will join in, their achievements
will be monitored by 4 billion TV viewers, and lead to more than 12 billion
views on the official website.
Between athletes and spectators, there are
many judges, technologies, engineers and reporters will give results around the
world. They are responsible for bringing the results from 100m finish line for
the racing judges, the stadium screen and the doping test staffs and awards
ceremony. It provides information to the television commentators, journalists
and bloggers in the world, as well as the event's official website.
Some require special technology, but in the
center of every event has some very ordinary PCs. They are offered by Acer,
which recently gave us a tour of Olympic venues and technology operation center
(TOC). Acer is a sponsor of the Olympics, and a part of its agreement with the
IOC is providing thousands of PC.
This is not the first Olympics of Acer.
These agreements usually come in pairs, and Acer has played similar role at the
Winter Olympics in Vancouver two years ago. However, about needed technologies,
this year's event is 3-time bigger. The planning began in 2008, right after the
Beijing Olympics.
PC Price
Acer is working with the London Olympic
Committee and Paralympic or LOCOG. This private company, led by Sebastian Coe,
is responsible for operating the Games, and its current budget is 2.2 billion
pounds. Second agency, is owned by ODA, responsible for providing
infrastructure (stadiums and so on) and has a budget of 9.3 billion pounds. In
summary, it is a very expensive event.
We do not know the real cost of IT
agreement between LOCOG and Acer, but we know that the number of PC that Acer
are offering, and it is quite big: 11500 PCs are being implemented all over the
game. More than 1,000 laptops and servers are used, there are 350 engineers
from Acer to keep equipment running smoothly.
You can expect to find the latest PC
hardware in an event that has achievement obsessive such as Olympics, but it is
not true. Reliability, rather than speed, is the key in an operation like this.
The results of 100m race must be available everywhere immediately after finish
– there is no place for error.
Therefore, this hardware was chosen 3 years
ago. Most PCs use Core 2 Duo processor at that time. The most common PC being
used is Acer Veriton L670G, which was chosen because of its small form (you can
insert 100 PCs on a pallet) and energy efficiency. After all, when you have 10
thousand alike PCs, operating and logistics costs grow rapidly.
Of course, the PC does not have many uses,
if only themselves; you also need software to run on them. Atos is the IT
manager for the Olympic and software provider for all events. Arbitration of
events, such as archery, will enter the results into the software handly, while
in other subjects, timing and monitoring devices are provided by Omega will
provide direct information to the software. Acer has changed the software for
each event instead of relying on a single package to do all the works.
