SETI on the SKA

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SETI on the SKA
Dan Werthimer University of California,
Berkeley
http//seti.berkeley.edu/
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• SETI history
• SETI today
• SETI future (SKA)
• Signal processing

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NOT FUNDED
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NOT FUNDED
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NOT FUNDED
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Porno in space FUNDED!
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First Radio SETI

• Nikola Tesla (1899)
• Announces coherent signals from Mars
• Guglielmo Marconi (1920)
• Strange signals from ET
• Frank Drake (1960)
• Project Ozma
• one channel, 1420-1420.4 MHz

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• Traditional SETI dogma
• ultra narrow band sine waves
• barycentric, beacons, FGK stars
• 21 cm
• Future dogma
• many bandwidths, frequencies,
• drifting signals, pulses,
• M stars, galaxies

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Its naïve to think we know how best to search
today, given our history of changing SETI
fashion.

• Multiple strategy is best
• (IR, Vis, Radio, pulse, continuous, targetted
• sky survey)
• Half of astronomy discoveries are serendipitous
• Examine glitches in data
• Data Mining Experiments

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OPTICAL SETI

• 1961 Charlie Townes Paper
• largely ingored until 1999
• 1971 Cyclops report calculates radio optical
• Todays lasers can communicate across galaxy

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Optical SETI experiments

• Lick Observatory
• (Lick, Seti Institute, Berkeley)
• Harvard (targetted ? sky survey)
• Princeton
• Berkeley

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10-meter Keck Telescope

• Survey 650 F8 M5 V, IV

Hipparcos V 0.55 (F8V) Sep 2
arcsec Age 2 Gyr
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Keck Optical SETI Data Mining

• Geoff Marcy, Amy Reines
• 650 stars (planet data)
• Echelle Spectrometer
• Can detect 10KW narrow band signal
• (10 KW laser on 10 meter telescope)

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SETI GOAL SkyCoverage FreqCoverage
Sensitivity-3/2 Nsignaltypes solid angle vs
number of nearby FGK stars? FreqCoverage vs
Noctaves? Pulses vs sinewaves vs drifting vs
broadband? FreqCoverage, SkyCoverage, signal
types other telescopes sensitivity SKA
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Radio SETI

• Targetted Search Strategy
• Project Phoenix - Seti Institute
• Sky Survey Strategy
• Serendip, SETI_at_home - UC Berkeley
• Southern Serendip - Australia
• Meta II -
  Argentina
• Seti Italia -
  Bologna

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SETI Programs at the University of California
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University of California, Berkeley SETI Program

• Graduate Students
• Chen Chang, Karl Chen, Paul Demorest, Nia
  Imara, P. Monat, A. Parsons
• Undergraduate Students
• Noaa Avital, Brian Boshes, Henry Chen, Charlie
  Conroy, Chris Day, Daniel Hsu, Wonsop Sim, Ryo
  Takahashi
• Astronomers and Computer Scientists
• David Anderson, Bob Bankay, Jeff Cobb, Court
  Cannick, Eric Korpela, Matt Lebofsky, Jeff Mock,
  Dan Werthimer, Rom Walton
• Administrative Staff - None

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SERENDIP IV
Photos Courtesy NAIC Arecibo Observatory, a
facility of the NSF

• 168M channels
• 100 MHz Band centered on 1420 MHz

• Carriage House 1 line feed
• Operating since 1997

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Why SETI_at_home?

• Coherent Doppler drift correction
• Narrower Channel Width-Higher Sensitivity
• Variable bandwidth/time resolution
• Search for multiple signal types
• Gaussian beam fitting
• Search for repeating pulses

• Problem Requires TFLOP/s processing power.

Solution Distributed Computing
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The SETI_at_home Client
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SETI_at_home Statistics TOTAL
RATE
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SETI_at_home in Canada

• 255,426 participants (0.8 of population)
• 112,000 years of computer time
• 72 million work units

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Web site 2 million hits/day 200,000
visitors/day (stats games popular
science less popular) 100,000 children,
families (including congress members and
their kids) 7,000 schools
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Desired SKA Parameters

• Wide bandwidth
• 1 M beams
• fat beams
• short dwell times ( 100 seconds)

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Gaussian Candidates
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BOINC

• Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network
  Computing
• General-purpose distributed computing framework.
• Open source.
• Will make distributed computing accessible to
  those who need it. (Starting from scratch is
  hard!)

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BOINC Projects

• SETI_at_home (Berkeley))
• Astropulse (Berkeley)
• ClimateModeling_at_home (Oxford)
• Einstein_at_home (Caltech)
• Folding_at_home (Stanford)
• ParticlePhysics_at_home (CERN)
• Stardust_at_home (U. Wa, Berkeley)

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AstroPulse

• Sky survey
• Covers decs 0 to 30
• 3 years of data recorded so far.
• Good time resolution
• Sensitive to 0.4 µs radio pulses at 21 cm
• DM range
• -1000 to 1000 pc/cm3
• Sensitivity
• 10-18 W/m2 peak (Coherent de-dispersion)

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Piggyback ALFA Sky Survey

• Improved sensitivity
• Tsys, integration time
• Uniform sky sampling
• galactic plane concentration
• Multibeam RFI rejection
• Larger Bandwidth

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Search for Optical/Radio Signals from Dyson
Sphere Candidates Charlie Conroy

• Looked for IR excess from 500 stars
• All stars had age 1 Gigayear
• 33 stars found with 12?m excess
• Searched for anomalous radio detection using
  SETI_at_home and SERENDIP IV databases
• Searched for optical pulse emission using OSETI
  experiment
• Thus far, none of the 33 sources have shown
  anomalous optical or radio emission

Color excess using 2MASS K band data and 12, 25,
60, 100 micron IRAS data. An excess at K-12
is clearly visible and disappears by K-25.
Dotted lines are Gaussian fits to the
distributions. The 33 IR excess candidates have
K-12 3? above the mean.
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Prelude Precedes SonATAIn Fall 2004For Use On
The ATA-32
3 beams with 30 MHz each PCs with accelerator
cards
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Future SETI Spectrometers
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Moores Law in FPGA world
100X More efficient than micro-processors!
3X improvement per year!
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Multi-Purpose FPGA-Based Spectrometer (NSF, A.
Parsons)
200 Aux. I/O
I
200 Mhz ADC

Pol. 1
Q
200 Mhz ADC
I
200 Mhz ADC

Pol. 2
Q
200 Mhz ADC
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• SETI Applications
• ALFA Sky Survey (300 MHz x 7 beams)
• Parkes Southern SERENDIP
• JPL/UCB/SI Survey (20 GHz Bandwidth)
• SETI Italia (Bologna)
• SETI_at_home
• Astronomy Applications
• GALFA Spectrometer Arecibo Multibeam Hydrogen
  Survey
• Astronomy Signal Processor ASP Don Backer
  (pulsars)
• ATA4 Correlator F Engine
• Reionization Experiments (Backer (UCB),
  Chippendale/Ekers (ATNF))

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Filter Response PFB vs. FFT
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Next Generation BoardBEE2 (2004/5) Chen Chang

• 5 Xilinx XC2VP70
• 40 GB RAM (8 GB each chip, 13Gbit/sec/chip)
• 18 10Gbit/sec infiniband ports
• 50 boards per rack, Tbit/sec infiniband switch
• Applications
• 1 GHz, 1 Gchannel spectrometer (single board)
• Next Generation ATA backends (ata32 2 boards)
• SKA imaging

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B2 Module board layout

• 5 compute elements on a board
• Up to 400 billion CMAC/s performance
• communication bandwidth
• 240 Gbps on-board 360 Gbps off-board

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Global Interconnects

• Commercial Infiniband switch from Mellanox,
  Voltaire, etc.
• Packet switched, non-blocking
• 24 144 ports (4X) per chassis
• Up to 10,000 ports in a system
• 2001000 ns switch latency
• 4001200 ns FPGA to FPGA latency
• 480Gbps 2.88Tbps full duplex constant cross
  section bandwidth

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19 48RU Rack Cabin Capacity

• 40 compute nodes in 5 chassis (8U) per rack
• Up to 16 trillion CMac/s performance per rack
• 250 Watt AC/DC power supply to each blade
• 12.5 Kwatt total power consumption
• Hardware cost 1M

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Unified Digital Processing Architecture

• Distributed per antenna spectral channel
  processing
• Multiple reconfigurable backend application
  processing
• Commercial packet switched interconnect

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Why you might not want SETI experiments on the
SKA
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Desired SETI SKA Parameters

• Wide bandwidth (0.1 to 35 GHz)
• 1 M beams
• Wide beams (primary and synthesized)
• - compact array strongly preferred!!!
• (for both targetted and sky survey)

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Seti Haiku
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Searching for lifeAnswers are revealedAbout
ourselvesPaula Cook, Duke University
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One million earthlingsBounded by optimismLeave
their PCs onDan Seidner
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Seti.org Planetary.org Seti.berkeley.edu