London Olympics earns distinction as 1st `big data` games

The London Summer Olympics is considered the first “big data Olympics” since it is being held after smartphones have grown into a major global fad.

In addition, this year’s tournament is creating numerous data for social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. A record number of people around the world are watching Olympic events streamed live on computers, tablet PCs and smartphones.

○ 1st `big data` Olympics

NetApp, a leader in enterprise and data management, forecast that the London Olympics will get a gold medal for big data. It released statistics Thursday on how much data is expected to be generated globally over the period of the tournament.

Nearly 60GB of data per second is expected to travel across British Telecom’s networks during the Olympic period, or equivalent to 13 DVDs that store about 4.7GB of information. To prepare for the expected surge in data, the company tested its networks with about 200,000 hours (around 23 years) of video files.

Great Britain, which plans to convert to digital broadcasting like Korea this year, has increased digital broadcasting for the games. More than 2,000 hours of live coverage of Olympic events will be broadcast and the London Olympics is expected to have 30 percent more data than the 2008 edition in Beijing.

○ Social media wins gold, too.

Social media has also played a critical role in the games. Twitter is expecting more than 13,000 tweets per second about the Olympics. An estimated 845 million people share Olympic news daily on Facebook, which has fewer than a billion users. Facebook users are expected to be responsible for more than 15 terabytes of data each day, which is equal to the data on 3,268 DVDs.

Social media has drawn a lot of attention as it delivers Olympic news faster than television.

The official London Olympic website is also popular, with the expected number of views to top a billion before the games are over. The world is expected to connect to the Internet via 8.5 billion computers, tablet PCs and smartphones over the course of the games.

The Olympic website of NBC, an official Olympics sponsor, had 1.1 billion views as of Wednesday (local time). It also sent 45 million live video streams.

sanhkim@donga.com