How DARPA Trucked Its Massive Radio-Frequency Testbed Across the United States (ieee.org) 22
IEEE Spectrum describes how the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) partnered with Pivot Technology Services to help them relocate their massive radio-frequency emulation testbed, called "Colosseum." The testbed was built for the agency's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) -- a three-year competition to demonstrate the validity of using AI to work together in order to use wireless spectrum more efficiently than operating on pre-allocated bands. Slashdot reader Wave723 shares an excerpt from the report: Colosseum was originally built and housed at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. That changed at the beginning of October, when the testbed was dismantled and later trucked to Los Angeles for the competition's finale, scheduled to begin at 3:30pm PDT today at MWC Los Angeles. [...] There may have been some molehills during the checks, but moving Colosseum definitely qualifies as a mountain. The testbed uses 3 Peta-Ops per second of computing power and 52 terabytes per second of data to emulate 65,000 channel operations between 256 wireless devices. It can draw up to 92 kilowatts of power and requires 200 gallons of water per minute to cycle through its cooling system to keep it from overheating.
Colosseum is housed within a space twice of the size of a cargo container -- in fact, its housing is literally built from two converted cargo containers put side by side. The halves arrived at the Los Angeles Convention Center during the set-up for MWC Los Angeles, and were hauled into the building and onto the convention floor by two 18-wheelers. We're going to move right past the crazy fact that DARPA and its hired logistics companies drove two semi-trucks into the Los Angeles Convention Center, because it gets better. To actually lower Colosseum's halves onto the ground, the next step involved something that both Tilghman and Gabel referred to as a "forklift ballet." As it turned out, the convention center didn't have a forklift strong enough to lift either half, so everyone improvised and used four smaller forklifts simultaneously by carefully arranging them around each half of Colosseum. It worked, but Gabel, in showing me a video of the forklift ballet, pointed out a moment where one of the forklift's rear wheels lifted off the ground as the machine and its operator grappled with Colosseum's weight...
Colosseum is housed within a space twice of the size of a cargo container -- in fact, its housing is literally built from two converted cargo containers put side by side. The halves arrived at the Los Angeles Convention Center during the set-up for MWC Los Angeles, and were hauled into the building and onto the convention floor by two 18-wheelers. We're going to move right past the crazy fact that DARPA and its hired logistics companies drove two semi-trucks into the Los Angeles Convention Center, because it gets better. To actually lower Colosseum's halves onto the ground, the next step involved something that both Tilghman and Gabel referred to as a "forklift ballet." As it turned out, the convention center didn't have a forklift strong enough to lift either half, so everyone improvised and used four smaller forklifts simultaneously by carefully arranging them around each half of Colosseum. It worked, but Gabel, in showing me a video of the forklift ballet, pointed out a moment where one of the forklift's rear wheels lifted off the ground as the machine and its operator grappled with Colosseum's weight...
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yeah, I'm a little skeptical that this "forklift ballet" is even remotely OSHA-approved.
Also, not sure how impressed we're supposed to be that something constructed in two shipping containers can be shipped.
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Weight/density issue.
I used to work with a massively muscled good ol' boy just out of high school. His football coach grows 20 acres of watermelons every year, and the team is his labor at picking time.... Mike could move and pick up darn near anything....
One day we got a new CT scan machine and it had some massive pieces of styrofoam around it for shipping. One of the blocks was almost a 8 foot cube, cut in half with some hollow space. Each half weighted maybe 50lbs. But Mike couldn't lift it - he had
My Own ! (Score:1)
Horrible logistics company (Score:4, Insightful)
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Indeed. Except for the demonstrated lack of professionalism and actual understanding of the engineering aspects, this is a complete non-story.
Dumb story (Score:5, Informative)
We're going to move right past the crazy fact that DARPA and its hired logistics companies drove two semi-trucks into the Los Angeles Convention Center
Well, you should, because that's standard operating procedure. Any trade show will have lots of trucks driving into the hall, either for unloading or to stay inside and be used during the show.
For shows like Bauma in Munich, they drive giant machines like the Caterpillar 787B mining dumper into the hall. That's unusual, but still not crazy.
The rest is a matter of logistics failure. Not checking beforehand that sufficient lifting capacity is available is dumb, but not uncommon enough to constitute 'news'.
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Johns Hopkins is in Maryland (Score:2)
The interesting bit (Score:3)
Apparently, you can now fit a petascale computer inside two shipping containers. And with a power requirement of less than 100 kW.
Stupid Fucks (Score:2)
Why not just use a crane?
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Why not just use a crane?
They were indoors....
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In this case I'm guessing they found the cheapest guy to do the job and found out the hard way that he had no idea what he was doing.
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found out the hard way that he had no idea what he was doing
This.
There are a number of different container handling solutions [mobiconsystems.com] available.
It could have been worse. They could have been doing this in China [dailymail.co.uk].
Fortunately ... (Score:3)
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Absolutely. I believe I heard someone on this site willing to rent out his Escort wagon. I could be wrong.
Colossus? (Score:2)
The name of this massive computer is just a little to close to "Colossus" for my comfort. (70s movie/book, Colossus -- The Forbin Project, was quite good)
Slashvertisement (Score:2)
I've been in logistics for nearly 30 years, and done shows for a number of years during that span.
Maybe this super exciting for the uninitiated, but nothing here is even mildly interesting or surprising, except the cardinal sin of not having adequate unloading capacity in place.* That's just dumb.
I shipped a 160t boiler unit from Sea/Tac to Chile. The pier we were using didn't have the capability to handle that in a single crane, so they co-operated 2 cranes at the same time, from two different control bo