DARPA Spectrum Challenge and ORBIT

Hi everybody,

As some of you have already heard (and are hopefully participating), the ORBIT testbed will be hosting the upcoming DARPA Spectrum Challenge (​http://www.darpa.mil/spectrumchallenge/). While this is great opportunity for our community to show creativity, it also means that (especially in the early rounds) challenge teams will have priority in scheduling access to resources. More pointedly, in the next 4 weeks, the grid and some sandboxes will be reserved up to 16 hours a day exclusively for the Challenge. This will be reflected on the scheduler as blocked time on the grid (you will notice large number of new virtual resources on the scheduler as well) - please refrain from using ORBIT during these hours. Also, in preparation for the actual start of the challenge we will be a.) retiring omf-5.3; b.) pruning the image repository (please delete all images; we will delete all images that have not been touched in the last 6 months); and c.) enhancing the USRP resources available on ORBIT.

Sorry for any inconvenience