  We present an overview of the Southern-sky MWA Rapid Two-metre (SMART) pulsar
survey that exploits the MWA's large field of view and voltage capture system
to survey the sky south of 30 degree in declination for pulsars and fast
transients in the 140-170 MHz band. The survey is enabled by the advent of the
Phase II MWA's compact configuration, which offers an enormous efficiency in
beam-forming and processing costs, thereby making an all-sky survey of this
magnitude tractable with the MWA. Even with the long dwell times of the survey
(4800 s), data collection can be completed in < 100 hours of telescope time,
while still retaining the ability to reach a limiting sensitivity of ~2-3 mJy.
Each observation is processed to generate ~5000-8000 tied-array beams that
tessellate the full ~610 square degree field of view, which are then processed
to search for pulsars. The voltage-capture recording allows a multitude of post
hoc processing options including the reprocessing of data for higher time
resolution. Due to the substantial computational cost in pulsar searches at low
frequencies, processing is undertaken in multiple passes: in the first pass, a
shallow survey is performed, where 10 minutes of each observation is processed,
reaching about one-third of the full search sensitivity. Here we present the
system overview and initial results. Further details including first pulsar
discoveries and a census of low-frequency detections are presented in a
companion paper. Future plans include deeper searches to reach the full
sensitivity and acceleration searches to target binary and millisecond pulsars.
Simulation analysis forecasts ~300 new pulsars upon the completion of full
processing. The SMART survey will also generate a complete digital record of
the low-frequency sky, which will serve as a valuable reference for future
pulsar searches planned with the low-frequency Square Kilometre Array.
