PRESTO: PulsaR Exploration and Search TOolkit

PRESTO is a large suite of pulsar search and analysis software. 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). To date, PRESTO has discovered well over a hundred and fifty pulsars, including approximately 100 recycled pulsars, about 80 of which are in binaries. It is written primarily in ANSI C, with many of the recent routines in Python.

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

- PSRFITS search-format data (as from GUPPI at the GBT and the Mock Spectrometers at Arecibo)

- SPIGOT at the GBT

- Most Wideband Arecibo Pulsar Processor (WAPP) at Arecibo

- The Parkes and Jodrell Bank 1-bit filterbank formats

- Berkeley-Caltech Pulsar Machine (BCPM) at the GBT (may it RIP...)

- 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