This summer, scientists supercharged their tools in the hunt for signs of life beyond Earth.
Researchers at the SETI Institute became the first to apply AI to the real-time direct detection of faint radio signals from space. Their advances in radio astronomy are available for any field that applies accelerated computing and AI.
We're on the cusp of a fundamentally different way of analyzing streaming astronomical data, and the kinds of things we'll be able to discover with it will be quite amazing, said Andrew Siemion, Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the SETI Institute, a group formed in 1984 that now includes more than 120 scientists.
The SETI Institute operates the Allen Telescope Array (pictured above) in Northern California. It's a cutting-edge telescope used in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) as well as for the study of intriguing transient astronomical events such as fast radio bursts.
Germinating AI The seed of the latest project was planted more than a decade ago. Siemion attended a talk at the University of California, Berkeley, about an early version of machine learning, a classifier that analyzed radio signals like the ones his team gathered from deep space.
I was really impressed, and realized the ways SETI researchers detected signals at the time were rather naive, said Siemion, who earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics at Berkeley.
The researchers started connecting with radio experts in conferences outside the field of astronomy. There, they met Adam Thompson, who leads a group of developers at NVIDIA.
We explained our challenges searching the extremely wide bandwidth of signals from space at high data rates, Siemion said.
SETI Institute researchers had been using NVIDIA GPUs for years to accelerate the algorithms that separate signals from background noise. Now they thought there was potential to do more.
A Demo Leads to a Pilot It took time - in part due to the coronavirus pandemic - but earlier this year, Thompson showed Siemion's team a new product, NVIDIA Holoscan, a sensor processing platform for processing real Ntime data from scientific instruments.
Siemion's team decided to build a trial application with Holoscan on the NVIDIA IGX edge computing platform that, if successful, could radically change the way the SETI Institute worked.
The institute collaborates with Breakthrough Listen, another SETI research program, headquartered at the University of Oxford, that uses dozens of radio telescopes to collect and store mountains of data, later analyzed in separate processes using GPUs. Each telescope and analysis employs separate, custom-built programs.
We wanted to create something that would really push our capabilities forward, Siemion said. We envisioned a streaming solution that in a more general way takes real-time data from telescopes and brings it directly into the GPUs to do AI inference on it.
Pointing at the Stars In a team effort, Luigi Cruz, a staff engineer at the SETI Institute, developed the real-time data reception and inference pipeline using the Holoscan SDK, while Peter Ma, a Breakthrough Listen collaborator, built and trained an AI model to detect fast radio bursts, one of many radio phenomena tracked by astronomers. Wael Farah, Allen Telescope Array project scientist, provided key contributions to the scientific aspects of the study.
They linked the combined real-time Holoscan pipeline, running on an NVIDIA IGX Orin platform, to 28 antennas pointed at the Crab Nebula. Over 15 hours, they gathered more than 90 billion data packets on signals across a spectrum of 5GHz.
Their system captured and analyzed in real time nearly the full 100Gbps of data from the experiment, twice the previous speed the astronomers had achieved. What's more, they saw how the same code could be used with any telescope to detect all sorts of signals.
It's Like a Magic Wand' The test was fantastically successful, said Siemion. It's hard to overstate the transformative potential of Holoscan for radio astronomy because it's like we've been given a magic wand to get all our data from telescopes into accelerated computers that are ideally suited for AI.
He called the direct memory access in NVIDIA GPUs a game changer.
Rather than throw away some of its data to enable more efficient processing - as it did in the past - institute researchers can keep and analyze all of it, fast.
It's a profound change in how radio astronomy is done, he said. Now we have a viable path to a very different way of using telescopes with smart AI software, and if we do that in a scalable way the opportunities for discovery will be legion.
Scaling Up the Pilot The team plans to scale up its pilot software and deploy it in all the radio telescopes it currently uses across a dozen sites. It also aims to share the capability in collaborations with astronomers worldwide.
Our intent is to bring this to larger international observatories with thousands of users and uses, Siemion said.
The partnerships extend to globally distributed arrays of telescopes now under construction that promise to increase by an order of magnitude the kinds of signals space researchers can detect.
Sharing the Technology Broadly Collaboration has been a huge theme for Siemion since 2015, when he became principal investigator for Breakthrough Listen.
We voraciously collaborate with anyone we can find, he said in a video interview from the Netherlands, where he was meeting local astronomers.
Work with NVIDIA was just one part of efforts that involve companies and governments across technical and scientific disciplines.
The engineering talent at NVIDIA is world class I can't say enough about Adam and the Holoscan team, he said.
The software opens a big door to technical collaborations.
Holoscan lets us tap into a d
More from Nvidia
17/09/2025
Today's creators are equal parts entertainer, producer and gamer, juggling game commentary, scene changes, replay clips, chat moderation and technical troub...
16/09/2025
The U.K. is driving investments in sovereign AI, using the technology to advance...
13/09/2025
Celtic languages - including Cornish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh - are the U.K.'s oldest living languages. To empower their speakers, the UK-LLM sover...
10/09/2025
GeForce NOW Blackwell RTX 5080-class SuperPODs are now rolling out, unlocking a new level of ultra high-performance, cinematic cloud gaming.
GeForce NOW Ultima...
09/09/2025
Inference has emerged as the new frontier of complexity in AI. Modern models are...
09/09/2025
As large language models (LLMs) grow larger, they get smarter, with open models from leading developers now featuring hundreds of billions of parameters. At the...
09/09/2025
At this week's AI Infrastructure Summit in Silicon Valley, NVIDIA's VP o...
09/09/2025
Inference performance is critical, as it directly influences the economics of an AI factory. The higher the throughput of AI factory infrastructure, the more to...
09/09/2025
At this week's IAA Mobility conference in Munich, NVIDIA Vice President of A...
09/09/2025
ComfyUI - an open-source, node-based graphical interface for running and buildin...
04/09/2025
NVIDIA today announced new AI education support for K-12 programs at a White House event to celebrate public-private partnerships that advance artificial intell...
04/09/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores the latest techniques and real-world applications of agentic AI, chatbots and copi...
04/09/2025
NVIDIA Blackwell RTX is coming to the cloud on Wednesday, Sept. 10 - an upgrade ...
03/09/2025
3D artists are constantly prototyping.
In traditional workflows, modelers must build placeholder, low-fidelity assets to populate 3D scenes, tinkering and adju...
02/09/2025
For more than a century, meteorologists have chased storms with chalkboards, equ...
28/08/2025
Brace yourself, COGs - the Locusts aren't the only thing rising up. The Coal...
28/08/2025
Last week at Gamescom, NVIDIA announced the winners of the NVIDIA and ModDB RTX ...
27/08/2025
AI models are advancing at a rapid rate and scale.
But what might they lack that (most) humans don't? Common sense: an understanding, developed through rea...
25/08/2025
Robots around the world are about to get a lot smarter as physical AI developers...
25/08/2025
As autonomous vehicle systems rapidly grow in complexity, equipped with reasonin...
22/08/2025
As the latest member of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture family, the NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPU builds on core innovations to accelerate training and AI reason...
22/08/2025
AI reasoning, inference and networking will be top of mind for attendees of next...
21/08/2025
Japan is once again building a landmark high-performance computing system - not ...
21/08/2025
From AI assistants doing deep research to autonomous vehicles making split-second navigation decisions, AI adoption is exploding across industries.
Behind ever...
21/08/2025
Across the globe, AI factories are rising - massive new data centers built not to serve up web pages or email, but to train and deploy intelligence itself. Inte...
21/08/2025
Get a glimpse into the future of gaming.
The NVIDIA Blackwell RTX architecture is coming to GeForce NOW in September, marking the service's biggest upgrade...
20/08/2025
Editor's note: This blog is a part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused o...
18/08/2025
With over 175 games now supporting NVIDIA DLSS 4 - a suite of advanced, AI-power...
18/08/2025
At Gamescom, NVIDIA is releasing its first major update to Project G Assist - an...
15/08/2025
Of around 7,000 languages in the world, a tiny fraction are supported by AI lang...
14/08/2025
NVIDIA is partnering with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a...
14/08/2025
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War - Definitive Edition is marching onto GeForce NOW,...
13/08/2025
Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] image editing model is now available as an NVIDIA NIM microservice.
FLUX.1 models allow users to edit existing imag...
11/08/2025
Using NVIDIA digital twin technologies, Amazon Devices & Services is powering bi...
11/08/2025
Packing the power of the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture in compact, energy-effici...
11/08/2025
Physical AI is becoming the foundation of smart cities, facilities and industria...
07/08/2025
This GFN Thursday brings an offer members can't refuse - 2K's highly ant...
05/08/2025
Two new open-weight AI reasoning models from OpenAI released today bring cutting...
05/08/2025
In collaboration with OpenAI, NVIDIA has optimized the company's new open-so...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA and OpenAI began pushing the boundaries of AI with the launch of NVIDIA D...
05/08/2025
NVIDIA GPUs are at the heart of modern computing. They're used across industries - from healthcare and finance to scientific research, autonomous systems an...
31/07/2025
August brings new levels of gaming excitement on GeForce NOW, with 2,300 titles now available to stream in the cloud.
Grab a controller and get ready for epic ...
31/07/2025
Interest in generative AI is continuing to grow, as new models include more capabilities. With the latest advancements, even enthusiasts without a developer bac...
29/07/2025
FourCastNet3 (FCN3) is the latest AI global weather forecasting system from NVID...
28/07/2025
The electrical grid is designed to support loads that are relatively steady, such as lighting, household appliances, and industrial machines that operate at con...
24/07/2025
For media company Black Mixture, AI isn't just a tool - it's an entire p...
24/07/2025
Sharpen the blade and brace for a journey steeped in myth and mystery. WUCHANG: Fallen Feathers has launched in the cloud.
Ride in style with skateboarding leg...
23/07/2025
In today's fast-evolving digital landscape, marketing teams face increasing ...
22/07/2025
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI On blog series, which explores th...
This summer, scientists supercharged their tools in the hunt for signs of life beyond Earth.
