Overview
    I am a Computer Science PhD candidate (ABD) planning to defend my thesis 2011. My thesis is "Programming model for event streaming in scientific workflows" and my advisor is Prof Beth Plale. My research focus is on Scientific workflows and building cyber infrastructure to facilitate domain sciences to simplify the e-science migration and worked with different science disciplines like Meteorology, USDA, Bio-informatics. I have worked on workflow composition, execution and monitoring tool XBaya and workflow engine i had developed is used in many OGCE science gateways in Teragrid. I did my MSc in Computer Science at Indiana University with Systems Major and Programming Languages Minor. I am a passionate open source developer and an Apache Project Management Committee Member and have worked with the Apache web services Community for many years and contributed to multiple Apache projects.

Publications
  • Chathura Herath and Beth Plale, "Streamflow - A programming model for data streaming in scientific workflows", IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud, and Grid Computing, 2010, Melbourne Australia.
  • Yang Y, Choi JY, Herath H, Marru S, and Kim S., "BioVLAB: bioinformatics data analysis using could computing and graphical workflow composers", in Handbook of Cloud Computing and Software Services, Ahson and Ilyas edited. CRC Press.
  • Thilina Gunaratne, Chathura Herath, Eran Chinthaka, Suresh Marru, "Experience with Adapting a WS-BPEL Runtime for eScience Workflows, Grid computing Envionments", IEEE Grid Computing Environments Workshop 2009, Portland Oregan.
  • Beth Plale, Bin Cao, Chathura Herath, and Yiming Sun, "Data provenance for preservation of digital geoscience data", preprint Geological Society of America special memoir volume entitled "Societal Challenges and Geo-informatics"
  • Yiming Sun, Bin Cao, Jeffrey Cox, Chathura Herath, Scott Jensen, and Beth Plale, "Event Processing in a Weather Data Science Gateway", To appear 3rd ACM International Conference on Distributed Event-based Systems, Tutorial, Nashville, TN, July 6, 2009.
  • Srinath Perera, Suresh Marru, Chathura Herath, "Workflow Infrastructure for Multi-scale Science Gateways", 3rd TeraGrid Conference, Las Vegas, 2008.
  • Beth Plale, Chathura Herath, Rahul Ramachandran, "Unified Programming Model for Instrument-driven e-Science Workflows , short paper The second ACM international conference on Distributed Event-Based Systems, DEBS 2008, Rome Italy.
  • Srinath Perera, Chathura Herath, Jaliya Ekanayake, Eran Chinthaka, Ajith Ranabahu, Deepal Jayasinghe, Sanjiva Weerawarana, Glen Daniels, "Axis2, Middleware for Next Generation Web Services", IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS), Chicago, September 2006 (Industry track).
  • Yi Huang, Aleksander Slominski, Chathura Herath, Dennis Gannon, "WS-Messenger: A Web Services-Based Messaging System for Service-Oriented Grid Computing", Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid, 2006,Singapore

Teaching
  • Co-Instructed B534 - Distributed Systems 2010 Spring. Taught eight in class lessons, designed and supervised the class projects.
  • Guest Lectured B669 - Scientific Data Management and Preservation 2011 Spring. Taught my thesis work in a guest lecture.

Research activities
  • Streamflow is a programming paradigm that allows scientists to program stream processing using familiar programming model provided by the scientific workflows. The Streamflow model allow not only allow the flexibility to specify the controlflow but also provide Complex Event Processing system based event operators to be used as a part of a workflow. Different components and subgraphs of stream processing have different runtime characteristics and Streamflow allows the different tasks to be scheduled to different execution and/or orchestration environments and there by providing means for maintaining throughput.
  • Sliding window based streaming Map Reduce framework is a framework built on top of Apache Hadoop to allow Map Reduce jobs be launched for streaming data events and how to manage the pipeline of map tasks using a windowing technique. This allows dynamic number of tasks be generated depending on the data sets and this paradigm is different from the workflow paradigm where the number of tasks that will be scheduled are static. By allowing such components be incorporated as part of a workflow or Streamflow this system opens up new opportunities and flexibilities to the computation.
  • XBaya is a workflow composition, execution and monitoring tool developed as part of the LEAD project and i currently extend and maintain this tool as part of OGCE toolkit. I developed a dynamic workflow interpreter engine that would allow scientific workflow user interactions features such as, on-the-fly workflow composition, smart rerun, dynamic workflow change and scholarly workflows.
  • Dynamic workflow Engine is a workflow composition engine which is light weight yet flexible and provides most features required by the scientific gateways. This workflow engind is used by many OGCE scientific gateway systems.
  • Lead II Vortex2 - Vortex2 is the largest and most ambitious effort to date to understand the behavior of tornadoes. LEAD II produced 5 short-term, highly accurate weather forecasts a day and make the results instantly available to researchers in the field below and using mobile phones. These forecasts were run using scientific workflow system on a Teragrid super computing cluster and i was involved in the team building and maintaining the cyber-infrastructure.
  • LEAD -  Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery is a project that is funded by NSF which is geared to build a distributed infrastructure that can accurately analyze, simulate and predict atmospheric changes and thus providing means for better meteorological forecasting. This is project involved in IU,NCSA,OU, UniData and i am collaborating with the team at IU Extreme Computing Laboratory to port LEAD to Goobus Toolkit 4.
  • Apache Axis2 -I was a member of the pioneering Apache Axis2 team. The Axis2 project is the successor of the Axis SOAP project, which can be categorized as a third generation SOAP engine which was designed to be highly extensible so it can provide a framework to develop the WS-* specification(WSRM, WS-Security, etc) . It gave birth to a new StAX based infoset model, AXIOM, which leverages the concept of differed building to greatly improve the memory foot print while giving a JDOM like API for convenient programming.
  • Apache EWS (Enterprise Web Services) - Apache EWS is JSR 109 implementation which in substance defines how the SOAP stack should be integrated to J2EE application servers. EWS was the JSR 109 implementation for Apache and it is currently used in Apache Geronimo and JOnAS Application Servers. This was part of my final year project for the B.Sc.
  • WS-Messenger - WS-Messenger is a highly scalable WS-Brokered Notification and WS-Eventing implementation developped at the Extreme computing Laboratory. Further it is capable of providing mediation between the two Web Service publish/subscribe inplementations that it support. It is scalable such that it can be run in multiple maching for improved throughput or load balancing. I have contrebuted to improve the scalability of the WS-Messenger and I am currently working on providing a WSRM implementation to WS-Messenger to make it support end to end reliable delivary of Notifications/Events.
  • X-Q - X-Q is a java based distrebuted persistant Queue implementation done as a sub project under WS-Messenger and currently lies in the WS-Messenger CVS. It can be run in a cluster an infact the high scalable nature of the WS-Messenger greatly appreciated because it uses the X-Q internally. It has been tested for over one million items(size-Notification message with headders) of queue length and could operate at over a 500 items per second. The Queuing rate dose not vary as the Queue size grows.
Chathura Herath on 2011