  We are performing a transient, microsecond timescale radio sky survey, called
"Astropulse," using the Arecibo telescope. Astropulse searches for brief (0.4
{\mu}s to 204.8 {\mu}s), wideband (relative to its 2.5 MHz bandwidth) radio
pulses centered at 1,420 MHz. Astropulse is a commensal (piggyback) survey, and
scans the sky between declinations of -1.33 and 38.03 degrees. We obtained
1,540 hours of data in each of 7 beams of the ALFA receiver, with 2
polarizations per beam. Examination of timescales on the order of a few
microseconds is possible because we used coherent dedispersion. The more usual
technique, incoherent dedispersion, cannot resolve signals below a minimum
timescale. However, coherent dedispersion requires more intensive computation
than incoherent dedispersion. The required processing power was provided by
BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing.
