Behind-The-Scenes Superbowl Tech 154
jfruhlinger writes "You might be a hardcore sports fan or might think of jocks with disdain, but if you're a geek you'll probably be intrigued by the tech behind the brand-new stadium where this weekend's Superbowl will be played. 84 Cisco access points, 70 wiring closets, 40,000 wired ports, 8 million feet of Ethernet cabling, 260 miles of fiber, 100 TB of storage — all on a single network."
884 APs (Score:4, Informative)
There are 884 APs, not 84 as the summary claims.
84 APs would be pitiful. Cisco recommends no more than 35 users per AP radio. You can probably push that up to 50 for public access WiFi, maybe - if you're thin stretched - a little bit more as long as many clients are 5GHz devices. Given that many APs will be back of the house and not accessible to the public you wouldn't be able to serve more than one to two thousand users on 84.
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If you read the article, "ATT WiFi is everywhere in the building". That is referring to ATT augmenting their 3G network via WiFi. All their WiFi enabled smart phones look for an SSID named attwifi. The layer three gateway of that network triggers the phones to submit their phone number to that gateway, which looks it up in the ATT subscriber database and grants access if you have a data contract with them. That alone will account for many, many thousands of users. Doing that is significantly cheaper for ATT
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All their WiFi enabled smart phones look for an SSID named attwifi. The layer three gateway of that network triggers the phones to submit their phone number to that gateway, which looks it up in the ATT subscriber database and grants access if you have a data contract with them.
Wait, so if I just set my SSID to "attwifi" and mess around with some no-op challenge/response stuff when phones connect, I can pretend to be an official AP for AT&T cell phones? I sure hope all of the data flowing over that network is encrypted...
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Don't know how hard it is to become a gateway. But it's distributed via unencrypted, public WiFi. The SSID is active at any Starbucks - go to one for a half hour and play with a packet sniffer.
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Probably not. But if you really want to watch me reading slashdot by sniffing the network, go right ahead. All the important stuff is done over SSL.
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Er, uh. I'm not much of a football fan -- at all -- but all I can think is this:
They're at the Superbowl. The fucking SUPERBOWL. Have they nothing more important to do than fuck with their iPhones, wait in huge lines for bad and expensive food, and then wait in huger lines to recycle the food, while wasting similarly huge amounts of time shuffling to and from their designated seat?
Couldn't they just eat and shit before they show up at the stadium, so they might actually be able to ... you know ... watch
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God damn. If only the scientists and doctors who improve our quality of life and bring new meaning to our existence got half this much attention. What a fucking waste. If space aliens exist and they find us, they might be obligated to sterilize this planet in case our madness and our pathological priorities are contagious.
This is w
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The problem with scientists and such is that they don't inspire communities. There's an intangible to be considered when a group of people in a certain community can rally around something entertaining and inspiring.
Or should we concentrate more on all the really evil things in the world. Sure athletes make a ton of money. Some of them pay the price.
Sounds like you aren't a welcome addition to whatever community you're a part of. I'm hoping the FBI has tabs on you,
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I find it doubtful there would be such a number that would make sense as a generic rule. First of all, stadiums have thick walls made from cement. Wireless signals don't penetrate at all. You can have two APs next to each other within 10th but separated by a wall and they can't see each other at all. Secondly, the 5GHz spectrum is finally picking up, and with the extra available channels it's good to use more APs at lower power. When you're not cranking up the transit power as high as you can (usually a fai
Mixed Units... (Score:2)
Re:Mixed Units... (Score:5, Funny)
8 million feet = somewhere between 4-8 million people.
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8 million feet = somewhere between 4-8 million people.
In terms of height or intestinal length?
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In terms of counting their toes and dividing by ten.
And then round up to the next whole number.
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"...somewhere between 4-8 million..."
Based on the numbers here: http://www.amputee-coalition.org/fact_sheets/amp_stats_cause.html [amputee-coalition.org]
I'd estimate that the figure would be *much* closer to 4 million than to 8 million.
In fact, you could have said "between 4 million and 4,020,100". (4 million * 200/199)
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I wanted to safely account for unreported amputees. Though considering the possibility of a swarm of unreported double amputees I should probably have played it safe and just said at least 4 million. Unless you think dogs are people too. In which case I should have said at least 2 million.
Hey, look! (Score:5, Funny)
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That's not entirely fair, either. You don't have 884 stand alone APs deployed, you have them centrally controlled either via an appliance (Cisco's WLC/WCS) or via cloud based controllers hosted on the APs themselves.
Sure, there's a lot more than Cisco out there, but most gear than can handle balancing power and channel assignments to counter interference for that large a wireless network is a heck of a lot more expensive than a cheap, off the shelf AP. And there are few non-brand manufacturers out there tha
884 access points, not 84 (Score:1)
From TFA
Also, they have their own 5,000 sq ft data center in the stadium. Pretty cool, but I think I'll still wait until the game's over so I can watch the commercials online in one go!
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That's the only reason I watch the Super Bowl. Although lately the ads haven't been too great. We don't get the cool "Bud. Weis. Er" ads of the past.
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We don't get the cool "Bud. Weis. Er" ads of the past.
"Doctor, this patient has money coming out the wazoo..."
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What could they need 100 TB of storage for?
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Most of the data is probably video. They have a gazillion cameras, recording in HD and 3D, and they may well need to store it raw/uncompressed, compressed, before and after editing. I do not have any intuition about how much space one game's video might take up, but they probably have seasons-worth of footage stored there, probably from thousands of games where commentators might refer during play. Someone else in another thread was talking about the Cleveland Indians being able to recall statistics and
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It'll be more entertaining to watch you act them out for us at the water cooler on Monday.
A single network? (Score:2)
A single network you say?
Am I the only one seeing an unexpected sacking by the angry geeks?
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Sadly most people assume that if something shares physical infrastructure, it must be on the same network. I guess that's why it's IT world, not Network World.
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remember what management get paid...
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Isn't that convenient. Guest wireless access on the same network as the POS terminals and EVERYTHING else. I'm all for VLAN segregation and ACLs, but come on now? How hard is it to isolate the network that handles transactions from the network that the fans are using to update Facebook?
I am going to give these guys the benefit of the doubt and assume that the reporter is just an idiot. There is no way that everything is on the same network. That would be security stupidity. I can imagine it now, "No y
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Same network, not the same network.It depends on how you define "network".
40,000 ports, PLUS 884 Access points each capable of 20-50 connections each all on the same configurable network infrastructure = one network. OR you can look at collision(broadcast) domains and understand that 40,000 connections alone would be impossible, and realize that they use VLANS and other routing protocols to segment the collision domains logically (routing, security, public, private, command/control etc).
I understood what th
No cheerleaders? (Score:4, Interesting)
This weekend's Super Bowl clash between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers will be the first in the game's 45 year history sans cheerleaders. [foxnews.com]
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I did, out of morbid curiosity, and I learned something I didn't know: When Fox isn't trying to push an agenda, they're downright boring.
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I don't know what made me click that link. I seldom do so if I don't recognize the domain. But thanks, friend. I really enjoyed it. Things like that give me hope for mankind.
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And nothing of value was lost.
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The storage is cool (Score:4, Informative)
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There was an article in the NY Times about Major League Baseball doing this for EVERY CAMERA ANGLE for EVERY PLAY, with full metadata for everything happening, including what crazy shit people write on signs.
Apparently it was all in queryable database so that you could find out, say, what happened when Batter X faced Pitcher Y on Team Z in Stadium 2.
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I have a friend who runs the booth equipment that does titles on sports events, with the NFL games being the biggest gig.
The thing that strikes me about it is how low-tech the process really is. The stats data is available for pretty much the entire history of the league, and they can pull up whatever they want, but beyond that it's really simple, a director says what they want in the headset and the operator looks it up, and it gets displayed in whatever format was defined in the couple of hours they have
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But does it run GNU/Linux? (Score:2)
It's all good stuff (Score:3)
He ended up parlaying that into a job with the WHO, and then moved to Geneva, where he's been ever since. Probably the most successful sociology grad they've had in a long time.
NFL database tech (Score:3)
I, for one, would love to see the UI that the techs use to run the queries on obscure NFL statistics during games.
"This is only the second time 3 consecutive 3rd down conversions have occurred between 11-3 rated AFC teams in outdoor stadiums with 2nd string quarterbacks using a QB option play"
And they are able to run these queries quickly...usually within the time of the next play. How do they do that? Is it raw TSQL styled queries or do they have some kind of UI for that?
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I have wondered about that too. The way I would do it would be to have a number of canned queries that become relevant as the game progresses, each able to flag itself if something "unusual" should occur. Surely they are able to query on the spot but there has to be a somewhat large pool of "interesting" things preprogrammed - just waiting to happen.
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I'll bet you money that the system just spits out stats like that for the benefit of the announcers. I'm sure they have one or more people doing realtime reporting as well. If the database is put together worth a damn then the queries won't even take long.
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IPv4 + football (Score:2)
the stadium has thousands more TVs, each with its own IP address
The truth is out: Football is driving the IPv4 address space exhaustion!
Power Sucker. (Score:1)
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Well I think the answer is simple. Texas should simply cut back on selling power to California as needed. Maybe then they'll get around to building a nuke plant or two.
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Yeah, won't somebody think of all those poor schoolchildren sitting in the dark. At 5 PM. On a Sunday.
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100 TB is impressive how? (Score:1)
$100 x 50 = $5,000 worth of storage. $10k if you include the cost of the file servers. Not very impressive.
My friend just put together a 8TB NAS for ~$1000...
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How long does it take from start to finish to write a terabyte of uncompressed digital video?
If you need to improve that dimension, the price goes up steeply.
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1080p H.264 only needs a 20mbit pipe to stream right?
I think a decent RAID card and gigabit NICs should be able to handle several of those streams at once...
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Car analogy:
My friend bought a car , a Toyota Carola and it only cost him 10k, it is just as good as your Ford Mustang Shelby Cobra.
See your broken logic.
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In all fairness, if the intended use is merely to get from point a to point b in accordance with all appropriate motor vehicle laws, then you can make the case that either is sufficient.
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Of course, people like to have the bad ass hardware, myself included, and it is hard to ask for a six figure salary when you are managing $10k worth of equipment...
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You really think they're streaming over 100Mbit/s? Most likely the camera's are connected with at least a gigabit connection for the low res and FibreChannel, 10GbE or some proprietary link for the rest and there are a LOT of camera's. To stream random input like that at a 2K uncompressed already exceeds 1 Gbps per stream and then you have the database, statistics crunching, parity or mirroring overhead, disk failures and repairs etc. etc. Your 50 SATA hard drives are not going to pull that. Even if you're
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Now another weird thing that is off topic a bit, for some reason when I drive my mustang, people get out of my way, but for some reason when I drive my little 4 door saturn. Everyone seems to cut me off , get in my way , attempt to race me when I pass them, it is like I have kick me sign on the back of my car,
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Say the cobra does 0-60 in 5 seconds .. and the camry does it in 15 .. thats 10 seconds that you are traveling faster .. then you are moving the same speed.
60 mph == 1 mile per min. 10 seconds == 1/6 of a mile ..
even if this was instant .. you would gain 1/6th of a mile at the start .. and thats it.
Perhaps some at the end where the stang can outbreak the camry .. Or perhaps around the off ramp where it will handle better.
There would be no advantage in traffic , as your speed is controlled by the car in fron
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I also said I won't break any laws, but you might lose your lunch. I also average about 26k miles a year of driving a year,m
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Ok .. makes sense about the lack of respect for a Saturn .. My point of reference being a crown vic , which folks got out of the way for. Likely thinking I was a cop or something.
Also .. not really trying to argue .. but driving hard enough to make someone loose there lunch would likely violate most states catch all "reckless driving" laws.
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So you think HDDs spend more time reading a constant stream of data (driving at a specific speed) vs seeking out that data?
What happens to your results if the drive(r) is spending more time seeking (accelerating) than reading data (going a constant speed).
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That's great, Sparky. Now host 100,000 people, several thousand journalists, multiple channels of live Hidef video, and 100 million people expecting you to not fuck up.
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Huge data-centers don't screw around with that consumer grade crap.
So Google's data centers are small? From what I understand, they use 5400 and 7200 RPM drives, and with the amount of storage and redundancy they're working with, I can't see why they'd bother with anything enterprisey for the drives themselves.
Granted, for this application, you'd want faster drives, but this is a special case. Just how much does it take to stream raw HD video to disk? Even so, you'd expect the article to mention why the storage is impressive, and just having 100 TB of it... isn't, until we
Disappointed (Score:2)
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I wanted to see some of the tech they use on the field, specifically the "flying" camera, the scrimmage line painter, and the 3D stuff.
That stuff doesn't belong to the stadium, it's in the TV network's truck. Like the guy in the video said "the TV networks have their own equipment in trucks downstairs"
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he scrimmage line painter,
Fascinating, yes, but that was last year [slashdot.org].
How much does all the DHS/Echelon stuff cost? (Score:1)
I'd like to see numbers on the cost of all the "spot the terrorist" cameras and facial identification and over-head blimp/uav monitoring stuff the DHS/FBI/whatever does at this event.
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Actually cisco sells that too. Check their physical security products.
It's Super Bowl, not Superbowl (Score:2)
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Not Brand New (Score:2)
It was opened in May of 2009, has had two full pre-seasons and regular seasons of Football, concerts, boxing matches, the NBA All Star Game already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboys_Stadium#Major_events [wikipedia.org]
They managed to screw this up?!?!? (Score:2)
So here you have the largest stadium network, and they put business information on the same network as the unwashed public?
I've configured numerous networks involving business data and customer access, and I'uine *never* put them on the same network - that's just stupid and invites the bored hacker to penetrate your network and disable and/or sniff the network for juicy details.
This is interesting how? (Score:2)
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100 TB of storage — all on a single network.
Color me completely unimpressed. I have half of that sitting in a third of a rack myself.
I have almost a tenth of that at my house.
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Yes, we get it, you are not American. But the majority of Slashdot readers are, you can tell by the assumptions in most Slashdot article summaries, and the extensive use of Imperial units in said summaries.
Im not an American and live on the other side of the world from them, and even I know what the Superbowl is. The fact I ( and presumably you) have no interest in American Football whatsoever is completely irrelevant ( body armour, padding and helmets are for girls, real men play Rugby )
If you truly don't
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Wait, those LED clothes and water bottle holders made out of spoons are yours? The striped silk outfit?
Friend, you're brilliant! Let me know if you ever come through Chicago, and I'll gladly buy you a drink.
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As an American, and a football fan, I can honestly say there is no reason for you to care.
I stopped caring after the NFC championship game when the Bears broke my heart. Again.
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And sadly that trade was the Bears' Herschel Walker trade. The so called last piece of the puzzle.
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Not at all. Cutler's a very good QB. I'm willing to bet that Cutler will either equal or better Aaron "Erin" Rogers' super bowl ring totals, when all is said and done. I was in attendance a few days after Thanksgiving when Cutler completely stole the show from the flavor of the day, Michael Vick.
I can be very harsh on soft Bears players, but Cutler is not soft at all. If the Bears can add one decent O-line player and one big wide-out, he'll be a top-tier NFL QB and
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Or, it is fun. You know, a thing you do with no tangible benefit, just for... yeah, fun! I, in general, don't like sports (i.e. watching sports). I come from Israel where people go gaga over soccer; I can't stand that game. 90 minutes of boredom. Basketball I mainly watch when an Israeli teams plays on the Euroleague, but that's it.
The only sport I do enjoy watching is (American) Football. After you learn the basic rules, you find out it is an interesting game with lots of teamwork, something that cannot be
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There *is*. We call it religion.
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do not click that link. Troll bait
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Given freedom, yes, some people abuse it.
I don't see how that could possibly be relevant. Would you rather not be free? In this case, would you rather be forced to sit zombified in front of a TV?
I can certainly agree that there's no particular reason anyone else should care about football, but I really don't see your point.
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And my point is, if you choose to put yourself on "a form of dopamine addiction" by choice, that's far better than being prevented from doing so by force. Of course, better by far than either of these would be to actually go play some sports.
That many Americans don't seem to use their freedom for anything useful doesn't make them less free, it just makes them dumber.