I am a Ph.D. candidate in the  Department of Computer Science at Indiana University Bloomington. My research advisor is Prof. Geoffrey Fox and I work in the  Community Grids Lab  as a research assistant. I am also a committer for Apache Sandesha and Apache Axis2 projects and the PMC for the Apache Sandesha project.  In my Ph.D. research, I am investigating different parallel programming runtimes such as, MPI, MapReduce, and Workflow runtimes under virtual and direct hardware environments  to derive a performance model and a set of architectural improvements for these parallel programming runtimes.

You can find the latest information of my research in my CGL-reports blog.

Education

Ph.D. Computer Science (Candidiate) Indiana University Bloomington
M.Sc. Computer Science 2007 Indiana University Bloomington
B.Sc. Engineering 2004 Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Moratuwa Sri Lanka

Research Interests

Parallel Programming Runtimes, High Performance Computing, Multicore, Cloud Computing, and, Message Oriented Middleware (MOM)

Research

CGL-MapReduce a streaming based map reduce implementation that uses a content dissemination network for all its communication. The main objective behind this implementation is to use MapReduce programming model for scientific computing avoiding the overhead imposed by the technique adopted by both Google and Hadoop in their map-reduce implementations, that is communicating data via files. Instead of communicating the data between the map and reduce tasks via files, CGL-MapReduce use NaradaBrokering's publish/subscribe messaging for the data transfer. In most of the MapReduce use cases, the output of the map task is significantly smaller than the size of the input data. In addition, the use of a file system based data communication mechanism is prohibitively slow for Iterative map-reduce tasks such as clustering algorithms. More detailed description of CGL-MapReduce can be found here.
Integration of Clarens Server, ROOT Analysis Framework and Naradabrokering to provide a collaborative framework for analysing distributed data, especially the data from particle physics experiments. The project is still in working progress. However, a proof of concept implementation/integration is completed.
Developed a C++ Client for Naradabrokering to facilitate the integration of Clarens Server from Caltech with Naradabrokering. This eliminates the dependency to have a JVM installed at client machines as in the JNI implementation. 
Developed a C++ Client for Naradabrokering using JNI technology allowing C++ clients to utilize the publish/subscribe messaging capabilities of Naradabrokering. Software is available for download here.
Developed a transport-independent scheme for tracking the availability of entities in distributed systems using Naradabrokering messaging substrate. The scheme enforces the authorized generation and consumption of traces (encapsulating entity availability).
Y790  - Performance testing on Multi-core chips (Results)
Implemented the message bridge to connect IBM Websphere and Naradabrokering. (The Architecture)
Y790 - Common Architecture for Functional Extensions on Top of Apache Axis2 (This was based on the work I did in axis2 project.)

Publications

Jaliya Ekanayake and Shrideep Pallickara, MapReduce for Data Intensive Scientific Analysis, Accepted for eScience 2008.
Jaliya Ekanayake, Shrideep Pallickara,  and Geoffrey Fox, A collaborative framework for scientific data analysis and visualization, Collaborative Technologies and Systems(CTS), 2008,pp. 339-346
Shrideep Pallickara, Jaliya Ekanayake and Geoffrey Fox, A Scalable Approach for the Secure and Authorized Tracking of the Availability of Entities in Distributed Systems in the proceedings of Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2007). Long Beach, California.
Srinath Perera, Chathura Herath, Jaliya Ekanayake, Eran Chinthaka, Ajith Ranabahu, Deepal Jayasinghe, Sanjiva Weerawarana,Glen Daniels Axis, Middleware for Next Generation Web Services on IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS'06)
Ajay Smitha and Jaliya Ekanayake, Analysis of the Usage Statistics of Robots Exclusion Standard. In proceedings of the IADIS WWW/Internet 2006 Murcia, Spain 5-8 October 2006.
Developerworks Article on Apache Sandesha: Use Apache Sandesha to support Web services implementation
Presentation: Asynchronous Web Services
Presentation: Expose an Stateless Session Bean as a Web Service
Presentation: Apache Sandesha and Axis2