  The Pulsar Machine II (PuMa II) is the new flexible pulsar processing backend
system at the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), specifically
designed to take advantage of the upgraded WSRT. The instrument is based on a
computer cluster running the Linux operating system, with minimal custom
hardware. A maximum of 160 MHz analogue bandwidth sampled as 8X20 MHz subbands
with 8-bit resolution can be recorded on disks attached to separate computer
nodes. Processing of the data is done in the additional 32-nodes allowing near
real time coherent dedispersion for most pulsars observed at the WSRT. This has
doubled the bandwidth for pulsar observations in general, and has enabled the
use of coherent dedispersion over a bandwidth eight times larger than was
previously possible at the WSRT. PuMa II is one of the widest bandwidth
coherent dedispersion machines currently in use and has a maximum time
resolution of 50ns. The system is now routinely used for high precision pulsar
timing studies, polarization studies, single pulse work and a variety of other
observational work.
