Dr. Dan Werthimer, University of California, Berkeley

"SETI@home and Instrumentation for Radio Astronomy Signal Processing"

Abstract:

I'll first describe six Berkeley SETI experiments at
optical, infrared and optical wavelengths.
One experiment, SETI@home, analyzes Arecibo data using
desktop computers from five million volunteers in 226 countries.
SETI@home participants have formed Earth's most powerful
supercomputer, averaging 200 Teraflops/second.
Users have the small but captivating possibility
their computer will detect the first signal from a
civilization beyond Earth.

Then I'll describe new techniques for rapid development of
radio telescope backends.
Next generation radio telescopes, such as the
Allen Telescope Array and the Square Kilometer Array require
1E15 to 1E17 operations per second of real time processing.
I will describe these telescopes, their instrumentation,
and the motivation for peta-operation/sec supercomputing.

Such computational requirements are far beyond the capabilities
of computing clusters or supercomputers.
Traditional instrumentation for radio telescope
arrays has been built from highly specialized
custom chips, many different boards and racks;
these instruments take five years to design and debug;
they are inflexible, hard to maintain,
and are usually out out of date before they are working well.

I'll present some of the new architectures and tools
that make it relatively easy to develop instruments
(even an astronomer can do it!), some general purpose
tinker-toy hardware and software modules we've
developed to build a variety of real time signal processing
instrumentation (spectrometers, correlators, beam formers, etc),
and how our group has built eight instruments in the last two years.