The Forklift Ballet: How DARPA Trucked Its Massive Radio-Frequency Testbed Across the United States

When it comes to relocating a data center, Joel Gabel is an expert. But when the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) selected the company he works for, Pivot Technology Services, to help them with a project, he says that it more or less went against all the best practices.

That’s because the project was relocating Colosseum. At first glance, Colosseum may look like a data center, but in reality, it’s a massive radio-frequency emulation testbed that DARPA built for its Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2). SC2 has been a three-year competition to demonstrate the validity of using artificial intelligences to work together in order to use wireless spectrum more efficiently than operating on pre-allocated bands would be.