[HN Gopher] Cosmic: SETI Institute Is Unlocking the Mysteries of...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Cosmic: SETI Institute Is Unlocking the Mysteries of the Universe
        
       Author : ulrischa
       Score  : 39 points
       Date   : 2024-01-14 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.seti.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.seti.org)
        
       | menthe wrote:
       | More technical article about the new deployment:
       | https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/vla/observing/cosmic-set...
       | 
       | So glad to see SETI alive. Next step, building a proof-of-work
       | token to bring back SETI@Home and leverage thousands more GPUs
       | :']
        
         | agucova wrote:
         | From the article:                 The COSMIC system is a
         | cluster of FPGA, CPU, and GPU hardware, which at all times
         | receives a copy of digitized data streams from each of the
         | VLA's antennas. The data received by COSMIC necessarily
         | reflects antenna-pointing, LO-tuning and digitization settings
         | commanded by VLA observers, but otherwise operates completely
         | independently. In particular, COSMIC is unaffected by any of
         | the interferometric phasing, channelization, or correlation
         | processes of the VLA's facility instrument: WIDAR.
         | COSMIC comprises three main components:               A fiber
         | optic splitter, which duplicates digitized data streams from
         | the VLA antennas and delivers these to COSMIC digital
         | instrumentation.          A small FPGA Cluster, which receives
         | VLA antenna digitized data streams, channelizes these to 1 MHz
         | frequency resolution, and transmits these data streams over
         | multiple industry-standard 100 Gb/s Ethernet links.          A
         | CPU/GPU Cluster which receives 1 MHz resolution data over
         | Ethernet and performs a variety of digital signal processing
         | operations, ultimately outputting SETI signals of interest
         | (often referred to as "hits") into a database for further
         | analysis.
         | 
         | And the CPU/GPU cluster in particular is extremely interesting:
         | The COSMIC CPU/GPU pipeline implements a beamformer, high-
         | resolution channelizer, doppler-drift search, and calibration
         | correlator. The configuration parameters of these algorithms
         | may be varied in order to best leverage the array's behaviour
         | as dictated by the Primary Observer.            The COSMIC
         | CPU/GPU processing pipeline is still under development, but
         | will have the following capabilities:                Buffering
         | of ~ 5 minutes voltage data for all antennas in the VLA;
         | Beamforming of up to 32 coherent tied-array beams;
         | Incoherent beamforming;         Configurable frequency
         | resolution between 1 MHz and 1 Hz;           Inter-antenna
         | correlation (used for gain calibration observations) with
         | millisecond time resolution; and         Doppler drift
         | searching for narrow band signals (in antenna or beam data)
         | with linear drift rates between -50 Hz/s and +50 Hz/s.
         | In normal operation, the COSMIC system will search for
         | candidate signals with non-zero linear drift rates, and will
         | permanently archive small data snippets (< 100 kHz bandwidth
         | and < 5 minutes duration) around these events.
         | 
         | This is really cool!
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2024-01-14 23:00 UTC)