The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: A Wideband Data Recorder System for the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope. (21st February 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: MacMahon, David H. E.; Price, Danny C.; Lebofsky, Matthew; Siemion, Andrew P. V.; Croft, Steve; DeBoer, David; Enriquez, J. Emilio; Gajjar, Vishal; Hellbourg, Gregory; Isaacson, Howard; Werthimer, Dan; Abdurashidova, Zuhra; Bloss, Marty; Brandt, Joe; Creager, Ramon; Ford, John; Lynch, Ryan S.; Maddalena, Ronald J.; McCullough, Randy; Ray, Jason; Whitehead, Mark; Woody, Dave
• Is Part Of: Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Volume 130:Number 986(2018)
• Publication Date: 2018-02-21
• Subjects: extraterrestrial intelligence -- instrumentation: miscellaneous; Astronomy -- Periodicals; Astronomy; Periodicals; Periodicals; 520.5
• DOI: 10.1088/1538-3873/aa80d2
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0004-6280

Abstract

Abstract: 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 −1 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.