From the source
Breakthrough Listen and the SETI Institute are bringing agentic AI into the daily search for extraterrestrial intelligence at the Allen Telescope Array in Northern California.
- Agents can now steer the instrument, correct incoming data and apply AI models to the live stream from a single natural language request, with
NVIDIA's Holoscan platform processing the sensor data.
- The array's DAQIRI library pulls terabits per second of sensor data straight into GPU memory, so observations are processed in flight rather than filling hard drives.
- Nexus, a web-based observatory orchestrator, acts as the agent harness, giving agents one source of truth for instrument state, compute resources and pipelines.
- The system handles 2.4 terabits per second on NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, with inference running on premises next to the instrument.
- The pipeline has already achieved the first real-time AI detection of a pulsar, in the Crab Nebula, and the team is now evaluating open models including NVIDIA Nemotron for observatories that may someday run offline on the far side of the moon.
