The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: a wideband data recorder system for the Robert C. Byrd green bank telescope
The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is undertaking a comprehensive search for radio and optical signatures from extraterrestrial civilizations. An integral component of the project is the design and implementation of wide-bandwidth data recorder and signal processing systems. The capabilities of thes...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Journal Article |
| Published: |
University of Chicago Press
2018
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/74658 |
| _version_ | 1848763337011101696 |
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| author | MacMahon, D. Price, D. Lebofsky, M. Siemion, A. Croft, S. DeBoer, D. Enriquez, J. Gajjar, V. Hellbourg, Gregory Isaacson, H. others |
| author_facet | MacMahon, D. Price, D. Lebofsky, M. Siemion, A. Croft, S. DeBoer, D. Enriquez, J. Gajjar, V. Hellbourg, Gregory Isaacson, H. others |
| author_sort | MacMahon, D. |
| building | Curtin Institutional Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is undertaking a comprehensive search for radio and optical signatures from extraterrestrial civilizations. An integral component of the project is the design and implementation of wide-bandwidth data recorder and signal processing systems. The capabilities of these systems, particularly at radio frequencies, directly determine survey speed; further, given a fixed observing time and spectral coverage, they determine sensitivity as well. Here, we detail the Breakthrough Listen wide-bandwidth data recording system deployed at the 100-m aperture Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. The system digitizes up to 6 GHz of bandwidth at 8 bits for both polarizations, storing the resultant 24 GB/s of data to disk. This system is among the highest data rate baseband recording systems in use in radio astronomy. A future system expansion will double recording capacity, to achieve a total Nyquist bandwidth of 12 GHz in two polarizations. In this paper, we present details of the system architecture, along with salient configuration and disk-write optimizations used to achieve high-throughput data capture on commodity compute servers and consumer-class hard disk drives. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T11:01:51Z |
| format | Journal Article |
| id | curtin-20.500.11937-74658 |
| institution | Curtin University Malaysia |
| institution_category | Local University |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T11:01:51Z |
| publishDate | 2018 |
| publisher | University of Chicago Press |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | curtin-20.500.11937-746582019-08-01T07:53:21Z The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: a wideband data recorder system for the Robert C. Byrd green bank telescope MacMahon, D. Price, D. Lebofsky, M. Siemion, A. Croft, S. DeBoer, D. Enriquez, J. Gajjar, V. Hellbourg, Gregory Isaacson, H. others The Breakthrough Listen Initiative is undertaking a comprehensive search for radio and optical signatures from extraterrestrial civilizations. An integral component of the project is the design and implementation of wide-bandwidth data recorder and signal processing systems. The capabilities of these systems, particularly at radio frequencies, directly determine survey speed; further, given a fixed observing time and spectral coverage, they determine sensitivity as well. Here, we detail the Breakthrough Listen wide-bandwidth data recording system deployed at the 100-m aperture Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. The system digitizes up to 6 GHz of bandwidth at 8 bits for both polarizations, storing the resultant 24 GB/s of data to disk. This system is among the highest data rate baseband recording systems in use in radio astronomy. A future system expansion will double recording capacity, to achieve a total Nyquist bandwidth of 12 GHz in two polarizations. In this paper, we present details of the system architecture, along with salient configuration and disk-write optimizations used to achieve high-throughput data capture on commodity compute servers and consumer-class hard disk drives. 2018 Journal Article http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/74658 10.1088/1538-3873/aa80d2 University of Chicago Press fulltext |
| spellingShingle | MacMahon, D. Price, D. Lebofsky, M. Siemion, A. Croft, S. DeBoer, D. Enriquez, J. Gajjar, V. Hellbourg, Gregory Isaacson, H. others The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: a wideband data recorder system for the Robert C. Byrd green bank telescope |
| title | The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: a wideband data recorder system for the Robert C. Byrd green bank telescope |
| title_full | The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: a wideband data recorder system for the Robert C. Byrd green bank telescope |
| title_fullStr | The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: a wideband data recorder system for the Robert C. Byrd green bank telescope |
| title_full_unstemmed | The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: a wideband data recorder system for the Robert C. Byrd green bank telescope |
| title_short | The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: a wideband data recorder system for the Robert C. Byrd green bank telescope |
| title_sort | breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: a wideband data recorder system for the robert c. byrd green bank telescope |
| url | http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/74658 |