Organisers of the Torino 2006 Olympic Winter Games have successfully completed the first of two technical rehearsals in the build-up to February’s competition.

The organising committee and Atos Origin, the systems integrator managing the IT infrastructure, carried out a one-week trial of all systems, which will be used in sporting events and for communications and security.

Some 292 events and continuity scenarios were tested during the week-long rehearsal, which emulated the busiest three days of next year’s winter Games.

The trials involved 200 IT professionals, including 110 based at the technology co-ordination centre in Turin.

‘These technical rehearsals are an integral part of the IT preparations for the Games, which is crucial for the smooth running of the Games themselves,’ said Jean-Benoît Gauthier, International Olympic Committee director of technology.

‘The entire team performed very well and the lessons learned during this trial will be invaluable when it comes to the real event in February next year,’ he said.

Situations such as hardware failures, information security issues, power outages and sports-related anomalies were designed and evaluated by a non-operational assessment team of 26 people.

Findings from the first rehearsal have been fed back to the development team.
The technology systems will be tested again in the second and final trials scheduled for mid-December, which will also involve TV crews, news agencies and sporting judges.

Atos Origin finished building applications, which will support all 15 winter sports, in December last year (Computing, 16 December 2004), and is now working with IT partners including Lenovo, Panasonic, Samsung, Nortel and Eutelsat to further train support staff.

‘We have tested IT systems along the way,’ said Claude Philipps, Atos Origin’s programme director for the Games.

‘Now we are putting the focus on testing the people and processes that work w ith the technology. We are putting everybody in their seats and observing how they react.’