A PRESTO-based Parallel Pulsar Search Pipeline Used for FAST Drift Scan Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a CPU-based, parallel pulsar search pipeline using PRESTO, which accelerates data processing and has successfully discovered new pulsars in FAST drift scan data, demonstrating its efficiency and effectiveness.

Contribution

The paper introduces a parallel pulsar search pipeline based on PRESTO that significantly reduces processing time and is easily deployable for large-scale pulsar surveys.

Findings

Discovered two new faint pulsars in PMPS data.

Successfully processed FAST drift scan data with tens of new pulsar discoveries.

Pipeline reduces processing time through process-level parallelism.

Abstract

We developed a pulsar search pipeline based on PRESTO (PulsaR Exploration and Search Toolkit). This pipeline simply runs dedispersion, FFT (Fast Fourier Transformation), and acceleration search in process-level parallel to shorten the processing time. With two parallel strategies, the pipeline can highly shorten the processing time in both the normal searches or acceleration searches. This pipeline was first tested with PMPS (Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survery) data and discovered two new faint pulsars. Then, it was successfully used in processing the FAST (Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope) drift scan data with tens of new pulsar discoveries up to now. The pipeline is only CPU-based and can be easily and quickly deployed in computing nodes for testing purposes or data processes.