  Data collection for scientific applications is increasing exponentially and
is forecasted to soon reach peta- and exabyte scales. Applications which
process and analyze scientific data must be scalable and focus on execution
performance to keep pace. In the field of radio astronomy, in addition to
increasingly large datasets, tasks such as the identification of transient
radio signals from extrasolar sources are computationally expensive. We present
a scalable approach to radio pulsar detection written in Scala that
parallelizes candidate identification to take advantage of in-memory task
processing using Apache Spark on a YARN distributed system. Furthermore, we
introduce a novel automated multiclass supervised machine learning technique
that we combine with feature selection to reduce the time required for
candidate classification. Experimental testing on a Beowulf cluster with 15
data nodes shows that the parallel implementation of the identification
algorithm offers a speedup of up to 5X that of a similar multithreaded
implementation. Further, we show that the combination of automated multiclass
classification and feature selection speeds up the execution performance of the
RandomForest machine learning algorithm by an average of 54% with less than a
2% average reduction in the algorithm's ability to correctly classify pulsars.
The generalizability of these results is demonstrated by using two real-world
radio astronomy data sets.
