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

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Open access
Authors
MacMahon, D.
Price, D.
Lebofsky, M.
Siemion, A.
Croft, S.
DeBoer, D.
Enriquez, J.
Gajjar, V.
Hellbourg, Gregory
Isaacson, H.
others
Date
2018
Type
Journal Article

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Citation
MacMahon, D. and Price, D. and Lebofsky, M. and Siemion, A. and Croft, S. and DeBoer, D. and Enriquez, J. et al. 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: Article ID 044502.
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Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
DOI
School
School of Electrical Engineering, Computing and Mathematical Science (EECMS)
Remarks

This is an author-created, un-copy edited version of an article accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The publisher is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at 10.1088/1538-3873/aa80d2

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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 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.