As a major sponsor and the data processing equipment partner assisting the Lillehammer Olympic Organising Committee to prepare and manage the Winter Olympics in Norway this month, IBM Corp has to face up to the challenge of providing a highly visible, efficient, reliable information system to a fixed deadline, without being able to test it fully in advance – but the company has put together a system clearly designed to show off and exercise all of its four major product lines. The service provided by IBM covers administration including ticketing, transport, accomodation and security; information for media and visitors; results and commentators’ systems; and the design and building of the Olympic facilities themselves. IBM has also been appointed information technology partner for the next four Olympic Games – two winter, two summer – up to Sydney in 2000. For the planning and design the Organisation Committee used the DAK ’94 Computer Aided Design system based on the RS/6000. DAK ’94 is a client-server network of 28 RS/6000s with IBM’s Architecture and Engineering Series software and SQL relational database. It stores computer models of the all the Olympic facilities and so enabled errors to be smoothed out before the actual building process began. For example, by simulating the view from a commentary box to ensure that it allowed full view of the start, middle and finish of a ski jump or that the judges boxes are situated so that the sun doesn’t shine in their eyes or which seats in the stadium permit only a restricted view, for ticketing purposes. Now that construction of the facilities is complete the system will be used for planning routes, ordering supplies checking security and access and tracking equipment items. From this, IBM Norway A/S has derived and is marketing a commercial version called the TIPS Total Information and Planning System, which is aimed at public sector, finance and industry, which will store information on buildings and geographical areas with graphics and text. Management of the 50,000 people who will be working or competing at Lillehammer will be centred on an ES/9000 mainframe processor which will run all the Olympic systems.
Guests are fed
All four IBM environments will be integrated into this network. A second ES/9000 will run as a back-up and a third will be on stand-by. The system will ensure all staff and guests are fed, transported, accomodated and that they have access to the information they require. The transport planning and scheduling system runs on an AS/400. For security each person involved in the Games will have a personal accreditation number and bar-coded card allowing access to different areas and facilities as required. The information system Info ’94 was developed in partnership with Anderson Consulting. Once the games begin there will be 3,000 PS/2s installed in the network, all running OS/2. Those that are located throughout Lillehammer will feature touch sensitive-screens for visitors or staff to gain easy access to everything there is to know about what is going on – sports results and times, medals, athlete biographies, weather, news and transport – in three languages. Info ’94 also provides an electronic mail system for staff. The results service will run on a separate IBM Token Ring local network and communicates with the ES/9000 through IBM 3745 Communications Controllers and telephone lines and use CICS software. It means that in each venue all marks and times will be fed into a PS/2 server on a Token Ring network and these results will then take less than half a second to reach score boards and commentator stations, IBM claims. The XVII Olympic Winter Games in Lillehammer open on February 12 and run for 16 days until February 27.
