AI agents join the search for extraterrestrial signals

The SETI Institute and Breakthrough Listen have added agentic AI to the Allen Telescope Array, allowing agents to steer the telescope, clean incoming data and run AI models from a single natural language prompt. The system processes 2.4 terabits per second on NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs, with inference performed on premises next to the instrument.

NVIDIA Holoscan and its DAQIRI library move sensor data directly into GPU memory for processing during observations rather than writing it to disk first. CyberEther, the SETI Institute’s signal-processing framework, performs calculations using the CUDA-X libraries cuFFT and cuBLAS. Nexus provides a web-based agent harness that coordinates instrument state and processing pipelines.

The pipeline has achieved the first real-time AI detection of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula. The team is also evaluating open models, including NVIDIA Nemotron, for situations where keeping data local and reducing turnaround time are priorities.