The Torino Winter Olympics web site humbly describes its technology goals:
"When you watch an Olympic event in television it all looks so simple; you see the thrust times, intermediate measurements, partial rankings and final results. This all requires an articulate system. TOROC provides the services, structure and infrastructure for the Olympic and Paralimpic Winter Games. It also manages the timings to then develop and distribute results arriving from competition venues."
This Ziff Davis article describes the challenge in some more detail:
The IT team started training four years ago to build a complex system that mixes proprietary Unix, Windows, and Open Source software. Lenovo is providing much of the equipment, including 5,000 desktops, 1,000 notebooks, and 350 servers. Other partners include systems integrator Atos Origin, Telecom Italia, and Omega.
This InformationWeek article describes the reliability and security challenge. Over 100,000 hours of testing and 500 what-if scenarios. At the 2004 Summer Olympics, over 5 million security alerts were recorded. Spammers have become much more "competitive" since.
But what an opportunity to show case high definition TV, new fangled sports health technology and so much more.
I wish I was there. But I would likely be checking out all the technology, not the events. Seriously. is Luge not a new web 2.0 start-up?
