The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: A Wideband Data Recorder System for the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope

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.

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• The Breakthrough Listen Search For Intelligent Life Near the Galactic Center I
• Extraterrestrial Axion Search with the Breakthrough Listen Galactic Center Survey
• A Fast Radio Burst with frequency-dependent polarization detected during Breakthrough Listen observations
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: A 3.95-8.00 GHz Search for Radio Technosignatures in the Restricted Earth Transit Zone
• Detection of ultra-fast radio bursts from FRB 20121102A
• First SETI Observations with China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST)
• Choosing a Maximum Drift Rate in a SETI Search: Astrophysical Considerations
• The Nine Axes of Merit for Technosignature Searches
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Wide-bandwidth Digital Instrumentation for the CSIRO Parkes 64-m Telescope
• Search for Dark Photon Dark Matter: Dark E-Field Radio Pilot Experiment
• Multiband Detection of Repeating FRB 20180916B
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Technosignature Search of 97 Nearby Galaxies
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: MeerKAT Target Selection
• Searching for broadband pulsed beacons from 1883 stars using neural networks
• Sensitive Multi-beam Targeted SETI Observations towards 33 Exoplanet Systems with FAST
• Strategies and Advice for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Technosignature Search of Transiting TESS Targets of Interest
• Setigen: Simulating Radio Technosignatures for SETI
• Multibeam Blind Search of Targeted SETI Observations toward 33 Exoplanet Systems with FAST
• A 4-8 GHz Galactic Center Search for Periodic Technosignatures
• Narrow-Band Signal Localization for SETI on Noisy Synthetic Spectrogram Data
• Two Extreme Steep-Spectrum, Polarized Radio Sources Towards the Galactic Bulge
• Green Bank Telescope Discovery of the Redback Binary Millisecond Pulsar PSR J0212+5321
• On Detecting Interstellar Scintillation in Narrowband Radio SETI
• A Green Bank Telescope search for narrowband technosignatures between 1.1-1.9 GHz during 12 Kepler planetary transits
• $4-8\mathrm{GHz}$ Spectro-temporal Emission from the Galactic Center Magnetar $\mathrm{PSR}J1745-2900$
• The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: No Evidence of Claimed Periodic Spectral Modulations in High Resolution Optical Spectra of Nearby Stars
• COSMIC's Large-Scale Search for Technosignatures during the VLA sky Survey: Survey Description and First Results
• Area Coverage of Expanding E.T. Signals in the Galaxy: SETI and Drake's N
• Interstellar communication. XI. Short pulse duration limits of optical SETI
• One of Everything: The Breakthrough Listen Exotica Catalog
• On the Deepest Search for Galactic Center Pulsars and an Examination of an Intriguing Millisecond Pulsar Candidate
• An Improved Machine Learning Approach for Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation in FAST-SETI Survey Archival Data
• 4-8 GHz Fourier-domain Searches for Galactic Center Pulsars
• A Search for Radio Technosignatures at the Solar Gravitational Lens Targeting Alpha Centauri