We have conducted a new search for radio pulsars in compact binary systems in the Parkes multi-beam pulsar survey ( PMPS ) data , employing novel methods to remove the Doppler modulation from binary motion .
This has yielded unparalleled sensitivity to pulsars in compact binaries .
The required computation time of \approx 17 000 CPU core years was provided by the distributed volunteer computing project Einstein @ Home , which has a sustained computing power of about 1 PFlop s ^ { -1 } . We discovered 24 new pulsars in our search , of which 18 were isolated pulsars , and six were members of binary systems .
Despite the wide filterbank channels and relatively slow sampling time of the PMPS data , we found pulsars with very large ratios of dispersion measure ( DM ) to spin period .
Among those is PSR J1748 - 3009 , the millisecond pulsar with the highest known DM ( \approx 420 pc cm ^ { -3 } ) .
We also discovered PSR J1840 - 0643 , which is in a binary system with an orbital period of 937 days , the fourth largest known .
The new pulsar J1750 - 2536 likely belongs to the rare class of intermediate-mass binary pulsars .
Three of the isolated pulsars show long-term nulling or intermittency in their emission , further increasing this growing family .
Our discoveries demonstrate the value of distributed volunteer computing for data-driven astronomy and the importance of applying new analysis methods to extensively searched data .