The SETI Institute, renowned for its decades-long search for intelligent life beyond Earth, has announced it will adopt NVIDIA's new IGX Thor platform to enhance real-time signal processing at the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) in Northern California.
The collaboration represents a major step toward bringing cutting-edge AI capabilities to radio astronomy at an unprecedented scale.
According to Dr. Andrew Siemion, the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI at the Institute, precision is key to their search.
"We search for any kind of electromagnetic emission that is inconsistent with the known or expected astrophysical and instrumental backgrounds," Siemion told The Debrief in an email. "This sort of agnostic search is incredibly computationally intensive and algorithmically quite challenging with traditional approaches."
"This new IGX Thor system will allow us to readily couple state-of-the-art AI processing with our raw astronomical data streams," he added, "making our searches more sensitive and more complete."
The ATA consists of 42 antennas continuously scanning the sky for radio signals that could reveal cosmic phenomena -- or potentially, signs of intelligent life. Historically, processing such enormous volumes of data was time-consuming and labor-intensive. With NVIDIA's IGX Thor platform, SETI researchers can now process and interpret signals directly at the telescope, dramatically reducing the time required to detect unusual patterns.
"NVIDIA IGX Thor enables us to run AI inference and GPU-accelerated signal processing workloads closer to the edge," said Luigi Cruz, Staff Engineer at the SETI Institute, in a press release. "Its compact form factor and power efficiency make it an ideal development platform for our next-generation pipeline, which is based on NVIDIA Holoscan."
"Our group has demonstrated that AI-based approaches to analyzing radio data can be incredibly effective," Siemion added. "These algorithms aim to identify electromagnetic emissions with a high degree of spectral or temporal coherence that match our expectations for distant cosmic technosignatures, while excluding signals consistent with instrumental interference."
He noted that new algorithms in development are designed to detect an even broader class of anomalies "free of any preconceived notion of what a technosignature might look like."
The move to IGX Thor builds on SETI's earlier success with the NVIDIA IGX Orin platform, which powered the world's first real-time AI search for fast radio bursts (FRBs) -- brief flashes of radio energy lasting only milliseconds. IGX Thor expands these capabilities, enabling researchers to scan larger portions of the sky faster and with greater precision. This reduces the chance of missing faint or fleeting signals and minimizes human error.
Deploying such systems, however, isn't always straightforward.
"One thing that separates our application of AI from many others is the requirement to deploy computing in very austere environments -- like the deserts of South Africa and Western Australia, or even more challenging environments like the far side of the moon," Siemion explained. "These are great places to get away from human-generated interference, but the data processing challenges are heightened."
Additionally challenging is the sheer data volume that researchers at the SETI Institute are faced with.
"Another thing to keep in mind is the massive data rates involved," Siemion added. "Our data streams are typically in the 10s of Tbps, which is 100,000 times higher than a typical "fast" internet connection."
Beyond astronomy, industries ranging from industrial safety to medical technology are adopting the NVIDIA IGX Thor platform.
As far as the SETI Institute and its efforts, Siemion and his colleagues' efforts not only advance the search for extraterrestrial intelligence but also highlight how technologies developed for everyday use can help push the boundaries of cosmic discovery.
"By combining scientific curiosity with advanced technology, we're transforming how we explore the universe," Siemion told The Debrief.
"The new NVIDIA platform gives us the reliability and performance to run complex AI models right at the telescope," he added.