The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: A wideband data recorder system for the robert C. Byrd green bank telescope

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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.

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Macmahon, D. H. E., Price, D. C., Lebofsky, M., Siemion, A. P. V., Croft, S., DeBoer, D., … Woody, D. (2018). The breakthrough listen search for intelligent life: A wideband data recorder system for the robert C. Byrd green bank telescope. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 130(986). https://doi.org/10.1088/1538-3873/aa80d2

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