I give a brief introduction to the problem of detecting gravitational
radiation from neutron stars. After a review of the mechanisms by which such
stars may produce radiation, I consider the different search strategies
appropriate to the different kinds of sources: isolated known pulsars, neutron
stars in binaries, and unseen neutron stars. The problem of an all-sky survey
for unseen stars is the most taxing one that we face in analysing data from
interferometers. I describe the kinds of hierarchical methods that are now
being investigated to reach the maximal sensitivity, and I suggest a
replacement for standard Fourier-transform search methods that requires fewer
floating-point operations for Fourier-based searches over large parameter
spaces, and in addition is highly parallelizable, working just as well on a
loosely coupled network of workstations as on a tightly coupled parallel
computer.Comment: 11 pages, no figure
