Pulsar Exploration and Search Toolkit (PRESTO)

PRESTO is a large suite of pulsar search and analysis software developed by Scott Ransom mostly from scratch. It was primarily designed to efficiently search for binary millisecond pulsars from long observations of globular clusters (although it has since been used in several surveys with short integrations and to process a lot of X-ray data as well). It is written primarily in ANSI C, with many of the recent routines in Python. According to Steve Eikenberry, PRESTO stands for: PulsaR Exploration and Search TOolkit!

VLA Radio & Chandra X-Ray Composite of the Mouse

Written with portability, ease-of-use, and memory efficiency in mind, it can currently handle raw data from the following pulsar machines or formats:

• Berkeley-Caltech Pulsar Machine (BCPM) at the GBT
• SPIGOT at the GBT
• Wideband Arecibo Pulsar Processor (WAPP) at Arecibo
• The Parkes and Jodrell Bank 1-bit filterbank formats
• The basic GMRT filterbank format (note that the Puna folks have not standardized their headers yet!)
• 8-bit filterbank format from SIGPROC (other formats will be added if required)
• A time series composed of single precision (i.e. 4-byte) floating point data
• Photon arrival times (or events) in ASCII or double-precision binary formats

The software is composed of numerous routines designed to handle three main areas of pulsar analysis:

1. Data Preparation: Interference detection and removal, de-dispersion, barycentering (via TEMPO).
2. Searching: Fourier-domain acceleration and phase-modulation (or sideband) searches.
3. Folding: Candidate optimization and Time-of-Arrival (TOA) generation.

Many additional utilities are provided for various tasks that are often required when working with pulsar data such as time conversions, Fourier transforms, time series and FFT exploration, byte-swapping, etc.

Acknowledgements: Big thanks go to Steve Eikenberry for his help developing the algorithms, Dunc Lorimer for the basic code which is used to process BCPM and WAPP data, David Kaplan for lots of help with the GBT SPIGOT code, Jason Hessels for many contributions to the Python routines (and along with Maggie Livingstone for the rednoise reduction routine), and Paul Ray, Ingrid Stairs, Fernando Camilo, Cees Bassa, Patrick Lazarus and Paulo Freire for many comments and suggestions (and even some patches!)