How cloud technologies change the world of sports
At first glance, sports and IT are far from each other, as far as can be imagined (not counting eSports , of course). But today, in particular, cloud technologies penetrate into all spheres of our life, and now they have become an integral part of major sporting events.
From year to year, their organizers pay attention to the issue of improving the quality of service for athletes and spectators, and processing large amounts of data becomes the number one task.
How is this possible and what technologies are changing the world of sports? Let's try to figure it out.
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/ Flickr / Surian Soosay / CC
One of the main components of the sport is the interaction with the audience, and today the connection with the fans is reaching a new level thanks largely to the cloud. For example, in 2016, a cognitive cloud system was launched at Wimbledon, which analyzes thousands of user messages on social networks to determine their emotions. The service delivers relevant information to viewers based on their interests in order to create the impression of a personal presence at a sporting event.
But still the main link between the sporting event and the majority of viewers remains the video format. And thanks to the use of DVR technology in broadcasts, fans can watch broadcasts or specific moments of the game anywhere and anytime.
The copyright holders of sports broadcasts are now processing them using real-time cloud services.
The Olympic Broadcasting Service went even further: for the first time the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games, as well as other significant events, were broadcast in virtual reality mode. A total of 85 hours of panoramic video were created, which were available for viewing on the Samsung Gear VR headset through a special section of the NBC Sports application.
New technologies have not bypassed those who are physically present at the events. For example, at the Games in Rio de Janeiro this year, each canoe and kayak participating in competitions was attached to a GPS sensor that transmits accurate information about the speed and direction of the boat. And on the big screen, fans observed differences between team tactics, and, for example, saw the reasons for the speed change.
To analyze the progress of cyclists, too, there are special technologies. American athletes see their performance during training in real time, using Solos augmented reality glasses. Information about power, speed and cadence is collected by sensors and transmitted directly to the glasses through the IBM cloud platform. Therefore, during a workout on the track, cyclists see their performance, without being distracted from the road.
Swimmers could also concentrate on winning, not on calculations during the Games: thanks to the installed digital meters. The sensors were located under the water near the place of turn. When touching the side, the sensor registered that the athlete had sailed one section. For the first time, this system was used at the World Swimming Championships in Kazan last year.
Assistance to coaches in the development of boxing strategies is provided by the American boxer Tommy Duquette’s Hykso company: it collects data using a sensor that allows you to track a boxer's hands moving in 3D at a thousand times per second. With it you can track the number, types and speed of strikes. Sensors are mounted on the boxer's hands under bandages and contain two independent accelerometers, as well as a gyroscope.
Sensors allow you to get training reports: athletes analyze their progress and how they strike. This technology was used by the trainer Billy Walsh, who revealed the formula for success: the less break between attacks, the more chances to win.
In addition, modern technologies make it possible to more accurately determine the winner in some sports: volleyball teams used video clips of episodes in disagreement with the decision of the judge. In this repetition, on the basis of which the second arbitrator reviewed the decision, were broadcast on large screens at the stadium.
Technology has influenced such a sport as archery. Paper targets have undergone modifications and now contain high-tech sensors. After hitting the target, the result is transmitted on the big screen. The system has high accuracy inaccessible to the human eye - the error is up to 0.2 mm.
However, the participants of the Olympic Games were able to evaluate cloud technologies on the other, even more important, side. Each athlete’s greatest fear is to be injured, which will undo years of hard work. What does the cloud have to do with it? Despite the fact that it helped to reduce the number of injuries: at the 2016 Olympics, the GE Healthcare Centricity Practice Solutions (CPS) cloud technology was used as official electronic medical data (EMR). Uploading data to the cloud eliminates the need to send piles of paper around the world to track the health of athletes.
The EMR system, in order to adapt training regimes, tracks 1000 parameters of each athlete, conducts retrospective analytics, makes predictions about changes in the state of athletes, and offers appropriate solutions. Using EMR, for example, has allowed doctors to reduce the incidence of anemia among athletes. Using blood tests, doctors can monitor hemoglobin levels and other laboratory test results, and then observe how a particular nutritional program affects the amount of hemoglobin in the blood.
In addition to preventing injuries and diseases, the system is indispensable in assisting injured athletes and affects the speed and quality of decisions made. For example, at the Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi, one skier with a spinal injury broke his hip, and the lung injury was so severe that the victim did not speak and could barely breathe.
“But I managed to get access to his medical data from a smartphone, and I found out that the patient was allergic to some drugs, and this should be taken into account when choosing a treatment, in addition, I received information about anticoagulants that he had already taken, - says Dr. Moreau. “The availability of such data is essential for the effective treatment of the patient.”
The US team successfully applied this technology at the 2012 Olympic Games in London and at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The system used improved the medical diagnostics of athletes at these competitions, and also created an impressive array of data that helped the team coaches develop strategies for improving athletic performance.
And using the capabilities of the Predix cloud computing platform will allow sports professionals from all over the world to collaborate, share data, explore the effectiveness of sports nutrition and prevent injuries.
The Olympic Games are a very large and large-scale event, comparable to an iceberg: in addition to the top, which viewers see in the stands or on TV, there is a huge hidden underwater part of the preparation and organization of the Games. And information technologies play a significant role there. For example, at the Olympiad in Rio, a cloud system was first used, which processed more than 300,000 accounts of journalists, diplomatic delegations and volunteers and managed the police and migration service checks.
It was impossible to prevent interruptions in work, therefore, fault tolerance ensured the presence of two data centers. Games business management was performed using an IaaS-cloud, which reduced the number of physical servers from 1000 to 250. This is not only about cost reduction: the official IT partner of the Olympic Games, Atos, therefore, takes care of the environment, reducing CO2 and emissions. saving electricity.
The cloud made it possible to save on testing: this year 200,000 hours of testing were performed in Rio, including two full technical rehearsals based on cloud services. And at the final technical rehearsal, 500 scenarios were performed, including the order of actions during floods, power failures, network problems, and so on. Thanks to the cloud did not need to create a physical laboratory of IT testing. In addition, the use of cloud technologies have reduced the cost of the Olympics, which this year amounted to $ 1.5 billion.
The benefits of cloud technologies were also appreciated by Formula 1 participants: the Swiss team Sauber F1 is actively using FlexPod solutions for data centers and NetApp MetroCluster software. IT is becoming a competitive advantage, allowing Sauber F1 to compete successfully with the larger and more famous teams Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren.
The team from Switzerland uses NetApp MetroCluster solutions (for more details, refer to the source section “MetroCluster components”) for their corporate systems, using two data centers to create storages. The infrastructure itself is already virtualized by 90% (about 55 virtual machines are deployed on five VMware ESX servers), and the company plans to replace 80 obsolete physical work nodes with 100 virtual workstations.
Sauber F1 notes that MetroCluster effectively ensures uninterrupted operation due to synchronous data recording in both data centers. Therefore, if a failure occurs in one of the data centers, an automatic switch to the second data center is performed within a few seconds, thus avoiding data loss.
At the expense of SATA drives can reduce the cost without sacrificing speed. On a virtual server, deduplication is used in conjunction with the intelligent caching of NetApp Flash Cache, which allows you to increase performance by three times. Under the deduplication process get 40 virtual machines, one of which is read from the disk. The remaining 39 are loaded from the cache to increase response time, this is especially true during serious updates.
Saving space on workstations, therefore, ranges from 8 to 10 GB. In addition, scaling deduplication is performed efficiently. Moving the virtual server and client environment to FlexPod has reduced even transport costs by reducing the total weight of the equipment by 50% (you can read about it here in the section “High performance + reduced costs”).
Today, sport is not just a competition, a meeting of rivals or an attempt to become the best. While athletes are preparing for new records, somewhere behind the scenes of any sporting event an army of technical specialists is working, setting new standards in the application of technology, be it IaaS, SaaS or something else.
Every few years, technological solutions reach a new level, which radically changes the experience of all participants in sports events, ranging from the fans and the athletes themselves, to the trainer and medical staff.
Additional reading:
From year to year, their organizers pay attention to the issue of improving the quality of service for athletes and spectators, and processing large amounts of data becomes the number one task.
How is this possible and what technologies are changing the world of sports? Let's try to figure it out.
')
/ Flickr / Surian Soosay / CC
New features for fans
One of the main components of the sport is the interaction with the audience, and today the connection with the fans is reaching a new level thanks largely to the cloud. For example, in 2016, a cognitive cloud system was launched at Wimbledon, which analyzes thousands of user messages on social networks to determine their emotions. The service delivers relevant information to viewers based on their interests in order to create the impression of a personal presence at a sporting event.
But still the main link between the sporting event and the majority of viewers remains the video format. And thanks to the use of DVR technology in broadcasts, fans can watch broadcasts or specific moments of the game anywhere and anytime.
The copyright holders of sports broadcasts are now processing them using real-time cloud services.
The Olympic Broadcasting Service went even further: for the first time the opening and closing ceremonies of the Games, as well as other significant events, were broadcast in virtual reality mode. A total of 85 hours of panoramic video were created, which were available for viewing on the Samsung Gear VR headset through a special section of the NBC Sports application.
New technologies have not bypassed those who are physically present at the events. For example, at the Games in Rio de Janeiro this year, each canoe and kayak participating in competitions was attached to a GPS sensor that transmits accurate information about the speed and direction of the boat. And on the big screen, fans observed differences between team tactics, and, for example, saw the reasons for the speed change.
Technology for athletes
To analyze the progress of cyclists, too, there are special technologies. American athletes see their performance during training in real time, using Solos augmented reality glasses. Information about power, speed and cadence is collected by sensors and transmitted directly to the glasses through the IBM cloud platform. Therefore, during a workout on the track, cyclists see their performance, without being distracted from the road.
Swimmers could also concentrate on winning, not on calculations during the Games: thanks to the installed digital meters. The sensors were located under the water near the place of turn. When touching the side, the sensor registered that the athlete had sailed one section. For the first time, this system was used at the World Swimming Championships in Kazan last year.
Assistance to coaches in the development of boxing strategies is provided by the American boxer Tommy Duquette’s Hykso company: it collects data using a sensor that allows you to track a boxer's hands moving in 3D at a thousand times per second. With it you can track the number, types and speed of strikes. Sensors are mounted on the boxer's hands under bandages and contain two independent accelerometers, as well as a gyroscope.
Sensors allow you to get training reports: athletes analyze their progress and how they strike. This technology was used by the trainer Billy Walsh, who revealed the formula for success: the less break between attacks, the more chances to win.
In addition, modern technologies make it possible to more accurately determine the winner in some sports: volleyball teams used video clips of episodes in disagreement with the decision of the judge. In this repetition, on the basis of which the second arbitrator reviewed the decision, were broadcast on large screens at the stadium.
Technology has influenced such a sport as archery. Paper targets have undergone modifications and now contain high-tech sensors. After hitting the target, the result is transmitted on the big screen. The system has high accuracy inaccessible to the human eye - the error is up to 0.2 mm.
Cloud guarding health
However, the participants of the Olympic Games were able to evaluate cloud technologies on the other, even more important, side. Each athlete’s greatest fear is to be injured, which will undo years of hard work. What does the cloud have to do with it? Despite the fact that it helped to reduce the number of injuries: at the 2016 Olympics, the GE Healthcare Centricity Practice Solutions (CPS) cloud technology was used as official electronic medical data (EMR). Uploading data to the cloud eliminates the need to send piles of paper around the world to track the health of athletes.
The EMR system, in order to adapt training regimes, tracks 1000 parameters of each athlete, conducts retrospective analytics, makes predictions about changes in the state of athletes, and offers appropriate solutions. Using EMR, for example, has allowed doctors to reduce the incidence of anemia among athletes. Using blood tests, doctors can monitor hemoglobin levels and other laboratory test results, and then observe how a particular nutritional program affects the amount of hemoglobin in the blood.
In addition to preventing injuries and diseases, the system is indispensable in assisting injured athletes and affects the speed and quality of decisions made. For example, at the Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi, one skier with a spinal injury broke his hip, and the lung injury was so severe that the victim did not speak and could barely breathe.
“But I managed to get access to his medical data from a smartphone, and I found out that the patient was allergic to some drugs, and this should be taken into account when choosing a treatment, in addition, I received information about anticoagulants that he had already taken, - says Dr. Moreau. “The availability of such data is essential for the effective treatment of the patient.”
The US team successfully applied this technology at the 2012 Olympic Games in London and at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. The system used improved the medical diagnostics of athletes at these competitions, and also created an impressive array of data that helped the team coaches develop strategies for improving athletic performance.
And using the capabilities of the Predix cloud computing platform will allow sports professionals from all over the world to collaborate, share data, explore the effectiveness of sports nutrition and prevent injuries.
Total savings
The Olympic Games are a very large and large-scale event, comparable to an iceberg: in addition to the top, which viewers see in the stands or on TV, there is a huge hidden underwater part of the preparation and organization of the Games. And information technologies play a significant role there. For example, at the Olympiad in Rio, a cloud system was first used, which processed more than 300,000 accounts of journalists, diplomatic delegations and volunteers and managed the police and migration service checks.
It was impossible to prevent interruptions in work, therefore, fault tolerance ensured the presence of two data centers. Games business management was performed using an IaaS-cloud, which reduced the number of physical servers from 1000 to 250. This is not only about cost reduction: the official IT partner of the Olympic Games, Atos, therefore, takes care of the environment, reducing CO2 and emissions. saving electricity.
The cloud made it possible to save on testing: this year 200,000 hours of testing were performed in Rio, including two full technical rehearsals based on cloud services. And at the final technical rehearsal, 500 scenarios were performed, including the order of actions during floods, power failures, network problems, and so on. Thanks to the cloud did not need to create a physical laboratory of IT testing. In addition, the use of cloud technologies have reduced the cost of the Olympics, which this year amounted to $ 1.5 billion.
The benefits of cloud technologies were also appreciated by Formula 1 participants: the Swiss team Sauber F1 is actively using FlexPod solutions for data centers and NetApp MetroCluster software. IT is becoming a competitive advantage, allowing Sauber F1 to compete successfully with the larger and more famous teams Ferrari, Mercedes and McLaren.
The team from Switzerland uses NetApp MetroCluster solutions (for more details, refer to the source section “MetroCluster components”) for their corporate systems, using two data centers to create storages. The infrastructure itself is already virtualized by 90% (about 55 virtual machines are deployed on five VMware ESX servers), and the company plans to replace 80 obsolete physical work nodes with 100 virtual workstations.
Sauber F1 notes that MetroCluster effectively ensures uninterrupted operation due to synchronous data recording in both data centers. Therefore, if a failure occurs in one of the data centers, an automatic switch to the second data center is performed within a few seconds, thus avoiding data loss.
At the expense of SATA drives can reduce the cost without sacrificing speed. On a virtual server, deduplication is used in conjunction with the intelligent caching of NetApp Flash Cache, which allows you to increase performance by three times. Under the deduplication process get 40 virtual machines, one of which is read from the disk. The remaining 39 are loaded from the cache to increase response time, this is especially true during serious updates.
Saving space on workstations, therefore, ranges from 8 to 10 GB. In addition, scaling deduplication is performed efficiently. Moving the virtual server and client environment to FlexPod has reduced even transport costs by reducing the total weight of the equipment by 50% (you can read about it here in the section “High performance + reduced costs”).
Today, sport is not just a competition, a meeting of rivals or an attempt to become the best. While athletes are preparing for new records, somewhere behind the scenes of any sporting event an army of technical specialists is working, setting new standards in the application of technology, be it IaaS, SaaS or something else.
Every few years, technological solutions reach a new level, which radically changes the experience of all participants in sports events, ranging from the fans and the athletes themselves, to the trainer and medical staff.
Additional reading:
- High technology in the world of sports: why the cloud will become the standard of the future
- At the 2016 Olympics using cloud technology
- Game industry: how IaaS gave a new life to the popular game Angry Birds
- Cloud technologies in the film industry: how DreamWorks solved the problem of processing large amounts of data
- Cloud technologies in the tourism business
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/315310/
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