  We describe a distributed processing cluster of inexpensive Linux machines
developed jointly by the Astronomy and Computer Science departments at
Haverford College which has been successfully used to search a large volume of
data from a recent radio pulsar survey. Analysis of radio pulsar surveys
requires significant computational resources to handle the demanding data
storage and processing needs. One goal of this project was to explore issues
encountered when processing a large amount of pulsar survey data with limited
computational resources. This cluster, which was developed and activated in
only a few weeks by supervised undergraduate summer research students, used
existing decommissioned computers, the campus network, and a script-based,
client-oriented, self-scheduled data distribution approach to process the data.
This setup provided simplicity, efficiency, and "on-the-fly" scalability at low
cost. The entire 570 GB data set from the pulsar survey was processed at
Haverford over the course of a ten-week summer period using this cluster. We
conclude that this cluster can serve as a useful computational model in cases
where data processing must be carried out on a limited budget. We have also
constructed a DVD archive of the raw survey data in order to investigate the
feasibility of using DVD as an inexpensive and easily accessible raw data
storage format for pulsar surveys. DVD-based storage has not been widely
explored in the pulsar community, but it has several advantages. The DVD
archive we have constructed is reliable, portable, inexpensive, and can be
easily read by any standard modern machine.
