Pulsar Searching Techniques and Their Applications to FAST Pulsar Search

We aim to see the feasibilities and necessities of applying current pulsar search methods to FAST pulsar search. We test pulsar search data processing with both software and hardware acceleration. We discuss methods used in current pulsar search, discoveries obtained by these methods and their characteristics. Based on PRESTO, we write scripts to run the pulsar search processing in a parallel manner. We evaluate the feasibilities and necessities of GPU acceleration in single pulse search. With the scripts, the time of processing a ParkesMulti-beam Pulsar Survey data file (with a typical size of 100MB) has been shorten from approximately 95 minutes to less than 10 minutes. Our benchmark shows that the single pulse search in one file has been accelerated by 20 times. The single pulse search can be done in shorter time compared with the data aquisition process. Used to search for binary pulsars with short orbit periods, phase modulation search is not necessary for FAST pulsar search; similarly, used to search for binary pulsars with relative long orbit periods, the acceleration search is not important for FAST binary pulsar search and the fast folding algorithm is only necessary when searching for faint pulsars with long spin periods. For data processing, both software and hardware acceleration can and should be used to reduce time cost.