| Radio pulsar research provides unique opportunities for testing our most basic understanding of the nature of matter and the universe. The surface gravity of these extremely compact stars, about 1 billion times the gravity on Earth, is the largest of any object in the Universe subject to observation. The internal densities of ten times nuclear density have not existed since the Universe was about 1/1000th of a second old. For these reasons, we have initiated several large-scale pulsar surveys that aim to discover rare objects especially suitable for their physics and astrophysics payoffs*. Currently the two largest-scope projects in the world are the /Arecibo ALFA survey/ and the /Green Bank drift survey/. Finding radio pulsars in radio-telescope data is very computationally intensive, currently about a thousand CPU-hours per telescope-hour. This is both I/O and CPU intensive processing on large data sets (~TB) that we have so-far always done on dedicated beowulf clusters. Huygens offers a combination of I/O performance, scratch disk storage and computing power that could make it well suited for this project and would allow us to find the most extreme radio pulsars, which was too computationally challenging before. This would the first use of POWER6 for any such pulsar project in the world. We here propose pilot time to install, test and bench mark our radio-pulsar signal processing pipeline on Huygens. |
