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Olympics Testing Labs Opened
The start of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece, is more than a year and a half away, but Schlumberger is already out of the blocks and has started the first leg of its race to provide IT services for the quadrennial spectacle.
The systems integrator last week officially opened its 1,000-square-meter integration lab in Athens, where it will test the games IT infrastructure. It houses 1,400 PCs and 20 km of electrical cables and will use 1.5 million Btu to cool the various servers, switches and other systems in the facilities.
Schlumberger will train the 350 IT professionals and some 3,500 volunteers who will operate the systems at nearly 60 sites around Athens.
Schlumberger, which ran similar IT operations at this years Winter Games in Salt Lake City, also has contracts with the International Olympic Committee to provide IT support at the Olympics in Turin, Italy, in 2006 and in Beijing in 2008.
Chip Making Eats Resources
The inputs needed to create a 32MB dynamic RAM chip weighing 2 grams are thousands of times larger than the resulting product, according to a report scheduled to appear in the American Chemical Societys Environmental Science & Technology journal next month.
Researchers from the United Nations University in Tokyo and the National Science Foundation followed the making of the memory chip through its entire production cycle to calculate the impact it has on the environment. They found that this process uses up 3.5 pounds of fossil fuels, 72 grams of various chemicals, 1.5 pounds of gases and 70 pounds of water.
Microsoft Names Group Leader
In yet another management shift, Microsoft has appointed Mohsen Al-Ghosein to head its Exchange Server group. Al-Ghosein, who joined Microsoft in 1990, replaces Malcolm Pearson, who is on a sabbatical but is expected to return in several months to an as-yet- undetermined post.
Al-Ghosein will oversee the release of the next major upgrade of the Exchange messaging server, code-named Titanium and due in the middle of next year. He has played several roles at Microsoft, including core engineering on COM and COM+ and writing a game for the Xbox game console.