Speaker
Description
The Hat Creek Radio Observatory (HCRO) in Northern California has a long history of radio astronomy innovation. It is home to the first telescope that was especially designed for the search for technosignatures and pioneered the way for modern "Large Number of Small Dish" (LNSD) interferometers. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) consists of 43 6.1-meter antennas and operates from 1GHz to 11GHz with upgrades underway that will increase the operational bandwidth to 14.5GHz.
We are currently pursuing two major development efforts aimed at advancing the ATA's capabilities. The first focuses on the development of a new GPU-based backend leveraging NVIDIA's Holoscan. By combining the Breakthrough Listen Accelerated DSP Engine (BLADE) with Holoscan SDK, we are building a next-generation data processing pipeline that leverages the full power of the underlying hardware by using Remote Direct Access Memory (RDMA) to facilitate data transfers between the network interface, graphics card and high-speed NVMe storage.
The second development effort focuses on direct digitization, initially trialing Mercury's 64 Gsps EB-RFS1140 digitizer evaluation board. We are aiming to develop a system capable of directly digitizing the telescope's RF signal at each antenna, providing dual-polarization complex digital data over a 12.8 GHz instantaneous bandwidth at 8 - 14 bits.
