Breakthrough Listen and NVIDIA

Since the launch of Breakthrough Listen in 2015, NVIDIA’s graphics processing units (GPUs) have been at the heart of the program’s computing systems. Each new generation of GPUs enables Listen to stream more data from its suite of facilities, sampling ever-increasing volumes of the “cosmic haystack” in search of technosignatures.

At times during the last decade of Listen, the surge in demand for GPUs has made it challenging to procure the hardware that is at the core of all Listen’s telescope backends – the systems that process and store data collected by the telescopes. Now, however, Listen is poised to benefit from the rising tide of digital signal processing and AI algorithm development that is powering the AI revolution.

Building on the program’s use of GPUs as data capture hardware, streaming spectrogram data to disk for offline analysis, Listen is now partnering directly with NVIDIA researchers, alongside colleagues at the SETI Institute, to pilot streaming processing of data in real time. The initial project used the Allen Telescope Array to collect and process data on the Crab pulsar, searching for signals in real time across a bandwidth of 5 GHz.

NVIDIA’s Holoscan platform is at the core of this effort. With direct access to the streaming data by algorithms running on the GPU, Holoscan has the potential to enhance Listen’s searches by enabling a wide range of searches of the data at its original resolution, without any downsampling or compression. Combined with advances in AI, including promising new technosignature search algorithms developed by several members of the Listen team, the collaboration with NVIDIA represents one of the best opportunities yet to find evidence of civilizations beyond Earth.