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Even with strong-column-weak-beam design requirements, story mechanisms have been observed in Moment Resisting Frames (MRF), resulting in concentrated drift demands that can result in severe structural damage to drift-sensitive components. Frame-Spine systems can redistribute demands with building height, but near-elastic higher-mode effects tend to contribute to floor accelerations, affecting damage to acceleration-sensitive nonstructural components. To mitigate this tradeoff, Force-Limiting Connections (FLCs) have been proposed to reduce accelerations through yielding components between the Frame and Spine, thereby limiting the magnitude of the forces. This study examines the sizing and placement of FLCs in a four-story Frame-Spine system using stochastic simulations. The T-shape yielding element dimensions in the FLC were modeled as random variables at each floor, and Monte Carlo simulations were used to explore their effect on drifts and accelerations. Results show the dominant role of the first-story FLC on balancing drifts and accelerations, while upper-story devices offered limited benefit. Design recommendations are provided to constrain first-story yielding element dimensions within effective bounds that reduce peak accelerations relative to the baseline Frame-Spine configuration. 

New international academic collaborations are being created at a fast pace, generating data sets each day, in the order of terabytes in size. Often these data sets need to be moved in real-time to a central location to be processed and then shared. In the field of astronomy, building data processing facilities in remote locations is not always feasible, creating the need for a high bandwidth network infrastructure to transport these data sets very long distances. This network infrastructure normally relies on multiple networks operated by multiple organizations or projects. Creating an end-to-end path involving multiple network operators, technologies and interconnections often adds conditions that make the real-time movement of big data sets challenging. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is an example of astronomical applications imposing new challenges on multi-domain network provisioning activities. The network for LSST is challenging for a number of reasons: (1) with the telescope in Chile and the archiving facility in the USA, the network has a high propagation delay, which affects traditional transport protocols performance; (2) the path is composed of multiple network operators, which means that the different network operating teams involved must coordinate technologies and protocols to support all parallel data transfers in an efficient way; (3) the large amount of data produced (12.7GB/image) and the small interval available to transfer this data (5 seconds) to the archiving facility requires special Quality of Service (QoS) policies; (4) because network events happen, the network needs to be prepared to be adjusted for rainy days, where some data types will be prioritized over others. To guarantee data transfers will happen within the required interval, each network operator in the path needs to apply QoS policies to each of its network links. These policies need to be coordinated end-to-end and, in the case where the network is affected by parallel events, all policies might need to be dynamically reconfigured in real-time to accommodate specific QoS policies for rainy days. Reconfiguring QoS policies is a very complex activity to current network protocols and technologies, sometimes requiring human intervention. This presentation aims to share the efforts to guarantee an efficient network configuration capable of handling LSST data transfers in sunny and rainy days across multiple network operators from South to North America.