About Zaman

Zaman is a third-year Computer Science PhD student at the University of Warwick and his PhD is fully funded by the Department of Computer Science. Under the supervision of Dr. Gihan Mudalige, Zaman is conducting research in the field of high-performance computing.

Prior to joining the PhD at Warwick, Zaman worked at London Stock Exchange Group Technology as a Senior Software Engineer, designing and developing high-performance stock exchange software components. He holds a BSc degree in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Additionally, Zaman completed an internship as an IT Research Assistant at LiveLabs, Department of Information Technology, Singapore Management University, Singapore.

Research

Zaman is currently conducting research on the development of a domain-specific-language for unstructured mesh based particle-in-cell simulations.

Abstract

Particle-in-cell (PIC) calculation is a well-established procedure for modelling the behaviour of charged particles in the presence of electric/magnetic fields. Performance portability of PIC applications on emerging massively parallel heterogeneous HPC hardware have become an increasing concern for scientific organisations relying on these applications. One solution is the development of high-level abstractions such as a domain-specific-language (DSL) that allows domain specialists to specify the problem while leaving the implementation to a lower level through automatic code generation techniques, translating the specification to hardware specific parallelisations such as OpenMP, MPI, CUDA, etc. DSLs for PIC codes, especially unstructured-meshed PIC have not been well developed in the HPC community. In this work, we present a new DSL for unstructured PIC calculations, using the source-to-source translation and code generation techniques developed in the OP2 DSL (a DSL for unstructured-mesh algorithms).

Github : https://github.com/OP-DSL/OP-PICLink opens in a new window

Teaching

Zaman is a Senior Graduate Teaching Assistant for the following undergraduate modules at the Department of Computer Science.

• CS118 - Programming for Computer Scientists (2021/2022 & 2022/2023)

• CS139 - Web Development Technologies (2021/2022, 2022/2023 & 2023/2024)

• CS258 - Database Systems (2022/2023 & 2023/2024)

In addition, Zaman is a Support Examination Invigilator (Summer 2023) at the Department of Computer Science.

Publications

• Zaman Lantra, Steven A. Wright, and Gihan R. Mudalige. 2024. OP-PIC - an Unstructured-Mesh Particle-in-Cell DSL for Developing Nuclear Fusion Simulations. In Proceedings of the 53rd International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 294–304. https://doi.org/10.1145/3673038.3673130Link opens in a new window

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• S.A. Wright, C. Ridgers, G.R. Mudalige, Z. Lantra, J. Williams, A.Sunderland, H.S. Thorne, W. Arter. 2024. Developing performance portable plasma edge simulations : a survey, Computer Physics Communications. 109123. ISSN 0010-4655. doi:10.1016/j.cpc.2024.109123
• R. Kumarasiri, A. Niroshan, Z. Lantra, T. Madusanka, C. U. S. Edussooriya and R. Rodrigo, "Gait Analysis Using RGBD Sensors," 2018 15th International Conference on Control, Automation, Robotics and Vision (ICARCV), Singapore, 2018, pp. 460-465, doi: 10.1109/ICARCV.2018.8581295.
• Kasthuri Jayarajah, Zaman Lantra, and Archan Misra. 2016. Fusing WiFi and Video Sensing for Accurate Group Detection in Indoor Spaces. In Proceedings of the 3rd International on Workshop on Physical Analytics (WPA '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 49–54. https://doi.org/10.1145/2935651.2935659Link opens in a new window
• Archan Misra, Zaman Lantra, and Kasthuri Jayarajah "Ontology-aided feature correlation for multi-modal urban sensing", Proc. SPIE 9831, Ground/Air Multisensor Interoperability, Integration, and Networking for Persistent ISR VII, 98310A (12 May 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2225143Link opens in a new window