  This paper describes a new real-time versatile backend, the Pulsar Ooty Radio
Telescope New Digital Efficient Receiver (PONDER), which has been designed to
operate along with the legacy analog system of the Ooty Radio Telescope (ORT).
PONDER makes use of the current state of the art computing hardware, a
Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and sufficiently large disk storage to support
high time resolution real-time data of pulsar observations, obtained by
coherent dedispersion over a bandpass of 16 MHz. Four different modes for
pulsar observations are implemented in PONDER to provide standard reduced data
products, such as time-stamped integrated profiles and dedispersed time series,
allowing faster avenues to scientific results for a variety of pulsar studies.
Additionally, PONDER also supports general modes of interplanetary
scintillation (IPS) measurements and very long baseline interferometry data
recording. The IPS mode yields a single polarisation correlated time series of
solar wind scintillation over a bandwidth of about four times larger (16 MHz)
than that of the legacy system as well as its fluctuation spectrum with high
temporal and frequency resolutions. The key point is that all the above modes
operate in real time. This paper presents the design aspects of PONDER and
outlines the design methodology for future similar backends. It also explains
the principal operations of PONDER, illustrates its capabilities for a variety
of pulsar and IPS observations and demonstrates its usefulness for a variety of
astrophysical studies using the high sensitivity of the ORT.
