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By Steve Ranger, 8 May 2008 12:53

COMMENT

I had a fascinating if rather rushed 46 hours in Beijing recently, getting a sneak preview of the 2008 Olympic venues - and meeting the IT team tasked with getting the technology infrastructure ready for the opening on 8 August.

The venues I saw are impressive - particular the Water Cube aquatics centre. I'm hoping (though not too optimistic) London can come up with something to rival it when it's our turn to host the event.

Follow this link for photos of some of the Beijing venues and the IT infrastructure that will underpin them.

And overlooking the Water Cube and the 'Bird's Nest' Beijing National Stadium is the home of the technology team and their testing lab. Perhaps the idea was that views of the venues would help concentrate the minds of the techies involved.

As silicon.com has recently spent a lot of time writing about one mega-project - Heathrow Terminal 5 - that didn't go according to plan, I was keen to hear from the Olympic team about the hurdles they have to leap to make sure they didn't suffer a similar fate.

Even though it is still months to the games, the IT team is in the process of freezing the software - getting to the point at which no more changes to the code will be allowed so that they aren't derailed by unexpected, last-minute problems. And testing and technical rehearsals, which started long ago, continue in earnest.

Of course, the Beijing Olympics hasn't happened yet, so we don't know how successful these preparations will be. But it's a project we'll be keeping close tabs on in the run-up to the games, so we'll soon find out.

Editor's choice - three things you should check out on silicon.com this week:

Check out our exclusive CIO Agenda research which finds out what tech chiefs are really planning this week, and the accompanying video here. Still want more? Check out the Naked CIO who this week is giving a controversial view of open source software.