A Scalable and Highly Available System for Serving Dynamic Data at Frequently Accessed Web Sites

This paper describes the system and key techniques used for achieving performance and high availability at the official web site for the 1998 Olympic Winter Games which was one of the most popular Web sites for the duration of the Olympic Games. The Web utilized thirteen SP2 systems scattered around the globe containing a total 143 processors. A key feature of the Web site was that the data being presented to clients was constantly changing. Whenever new results were entered into the system, updated Web pages reflecting the changes were made available to the rest of the world within seconds.