7 SETI Program at the Medicina INAF Radioastronomy …
49
Fig. 7.2 The Sentinel 2
spectrometer installed at the
Medicina Radio
Astronomical Station
(Credits to Stelio
Montebugnoli,
IRA—Medicina Radio
Astronomical Station)
enough computing power for the algorithm or must be left free for other important
tasks. This solution is also typical today both on high level scientific and industrial
applications and on the consumer market (game console).
The Sentinel 2 (see Fig. 7.2) is based on a high-end dual-socket Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP) Intel Pentium II Xeon PC [3]. Like the previous one, Sentinel 2 is
equipped with a DAQ board. It is connected to the PCI bus that was not supported by
an onboard DSP microprocessor CPU because the two Xeon Processor had enough
computing power both to calculate the FFT and to control the system, the user interface, and the data storage. In this configuration, the Sentinel 2 was able to analyze a
20 MHz bandwidth with a maximum of 4096 channels (5 kHz spectral resolution).
Both the Sentinel systems proved to be so flexible that they could also be used
in other applications such as the EMBLA [4] and SETI projects. As far as the
recent research is concerned, Sentinel systems, albeit inadequate due to limitations
in computing power that led to low spectral resolution, were an excellent test for the
development of future projects.
The Sentinel systems were dismissed during the 2000s because of the rapid obsolescence and reduced temporal reliability of the platform, mainly when used 24 h
per day and 365 days per year.
49
Fig. 7.2 The Sentinel 2
spectrometer installed at the
Medicina Radio
Astronomical Station
(Credits to Stelio
Montebugnoli,
IRA—Medicina Radio
Astronomical Station)
enough computing power for the algorithm or must be left free for other important
tasks. This solution is also typical today both on high level scientific and industrial
applications and on the consumer market (game console).
The Sentinel 2 (see Fig. 7.2) is based on a high-end dual-socket Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP) Intel Pentium II Xeon PC [3]. Like the previous one, Sentinel 2 is
equipped with a DAQ board. It is connected to the PCI bus that was not supported by
an onboard DSP microprocessor CPU because the two Xeon Processor had enough
computing power both to calculate the FFT and to control the system, the user interface, and the data storage. In this configuration, the Sentinel 2 was able to analyze a
20 MHz bandwidth with a maximum of 4096 channels (5 kHz spectral resolution).
Both the Sentinel systems proved to be so flexible that they could also be used
in other applications such as the EMBLA [4] and SETI projects. As far as the
recent research is concerned, Sentinel systems, albeit inadequate due to limitations
in computing power that led to low spectral resolution, were an excellent test for the
development of future projects.
The Sentinel systems were dismissed during the 2000s because of the rapid obsolescence and reduced temporal reliability of the platform, mainly when used 24 h
per day and 365 days per year.