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!

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.

The Fourier-Domain acceleration search technique that PRESTO uses in the routine accelsearch is described in Ransom, Eikenberry, and Middleditch (2002), and the phase-modulation search technique used by search_bin is described in Ransom, Cordes, and Eikenberry (2003).  Some other basic information about PRESTO can be found in my thesis.  I will eventually get around to finishing the documentation for PRESTO, but until then you should know that each routine returns its basic usage when you call it with no arguments.  I am also willing to provide limited support via email or telephone (434-296-0320).

To date, PRESTO has discovered more than 60 recycled pulsars, over 40 of which are in binaries!

Getting PRESTO:  A recent version, along with a modified version of FFTW that speeds up the conversion of correlator lags to frequency channels (i.e. for WAPP and SPIGOT data), can be downloaded from here. 

Please let me know if you decide to use PRESTO for any "real" searches.  And if you find anything with it, it would be great if you would cite either my thesis or whichever of the two papers listed above is appropriate.  Thanks!

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!).

Scott Ransom