Recall films or news reporting video in which a human chain is passing items from a stockpile area to where they are needed. (Examples include passing filled sandbags hand-to-hand up to the riverbank...

Recall films or news reporting video in which a human chain is passing items from a stockpile area to where they are needed. (Examples include passing filled sandbags hand-to-hand up to the riverbank to build a dike to prevent the river from overflowing its banks, and a bucketbrigade in which buckets of water are being passed hand-to-hand from the water supply to the fire scene.) Given the following data, simulate an N-person chain and compare it to N persons working independently, each moving an item from the stockpile area to where it is needed. The objective is to determine the speedup, that is, the increase in the rate of delivery of the needed items, attainable through the pipelining solution versus that obtainable through the independently operating individuals’ solution. Given that there are 1 million items to be moved, determine the speedup for cases in which the number of available people is 150, 300, and 3000. Data: It is 300 meters from the stockpile to where the items are needed; a human working individually can carry one item at a time and travel at a speed of 1 meter per second carrying that item and 1.5 meters per second when traveling without an item (the return trip). Working cooperatively, the humans stand 1 meter apart and hand the item from hand-to-hand; it takes 1.25 seconds to grab an item from the person behind you, turn, and hand it to the person in front of you. Obviously, if there are only a few humans, the chain, or pipelining, approach is not practical. Similarly, if there are multiples of 300 people, multiple chains can operate in parallel.