Thilina Gunarathne

I'm a specialist managing director within the KPMG Engineering practice. I help my clients succeed in their Cloud-enabled digital transformation, starting from strategy & design to the development & deployment of complex Cloud solutions. I enjoy guiding and leading teams to develop & deliver cutting-edge technical solutions to solve high-value business challenges.

I've helped my clients develop large-scale solutions utilizing AI/ML, big data, containerization, IoT, & other cloud technologies. I've also helped them migrate/re-platform their existing applications and to develop & operationalize enterprise-grade secure cloud platforms. My clients include Fortune 500, in financial services, healthcare, retail, telecom, and sports industries. I also led the architecture and development of the KPMG HCLS D&A innovations, including the development & operationalization of the self-service cloud infrastructure and data warehouse.

I have extensive experience in distributed systems development, big data analytics, cloud computing and AI/ML technologies. I've published two books, many articles, and peer-reviewed research papers in the areas of Cloud and distributed computing. I was elected as a Member of the Apache Software Foundation in recognition of my open source contributions. I'm an adjunct professor of business analytics at the College of Business, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Relevant Experience

• Establish and lead the Containerization CoE for a fortune 50 bank, supporting the migration, re-platforming, development, and deployment of many high impact applications to container platform (Azure and on-prem).
• Project lead and the chief architect of the KPMG Trusted Cloud Platform (KTC). KTC is a regulatory compliant secure D&A platform with data lake and advanced analytics capabilities to support Healthcare and Life Sciences D&A development and client engagements. Also led the technology, architecture, and development of KPMG HCLS D&A solutions & accelerators.  Led a total team of 50+ developers and architects ($10M+/year budget)
• Architect and the development lead of the KPMG Global AI/NLP platform with several cloud & K8S based deployments across the globe
• Implemented secure big data lakes, data warehouses, AI/ML platforms & other solutions on Cloud (Azure, AWS, GCP) to clients in various industries
• Helped many clients in their digital transformation journeys by designing their data, analytics, AI/ML, cloud, and hybrid cloud strategies
• Architected and led the distributed systems development of the Cloud hosted KPMG Sports Schedule optimization engine. Cloud backend supports optimization computations spanning 1000’s cores. Currently deployed at one of the leading professional sports leagues in the USA
• Developed big data analytics solutions for the wireless industry. Implemented one of the world’s largest social network analysis algorithms involving hundreds of millions of nodes using Hadoop technologies.

Selected Publications

Refer to Google Scholar (h-index:18, i10-index:24) for the complete list of publications.

• “Hadoop MapReduce V2 Cookbook” (Book) Thilina Gunarathne. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1783285478, 2015.
• “Hadoop MapReduce Cookbook” (Book) Thilina Gunarathne and Srinath Perera. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1849517282. 2013.
• T. Gunarathne, T.-L. Wu, J. Y. Choi, S.-H. Bae, and J. Qiu, "Cloud computing paradigms for pleasingly parallel biomedical applications," Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, 2011.
• T. Gunarathne, T.-L. Wu, B. Zhang and J. Qiu, “Scalable Parallel Scientific Computing Using Twister4Azure”. Future Generation Computer Systems(FGCS), 2013 Volume 29, Issue 4, pp. 1035-1048.
• J. Ekanayake, T. Gunarathne, and J. Qiu, "Cloud Technologies for Bioinformatics Applications" Parallel and Distributed Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. 22, pp. 998-1011, 2011.
• T. Gunarathne, J. Qiu, and D.Gannon,  “Towards a Collective Layer in the Big Data Stack”, 14th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Grid Computing (CCGRID 2014). Chicago, USA. May 2014.
• T. Gunarathne, T.-L. Wu, B. Zhang and J. Qiu, “Portable Parallel Programming on Cloud and HPC: Scientific Applications of Twister4Azure”. 4^th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC 2011). Melbourne, Austrailia. Dec 2011.
• T. Gunarathne, T. L. Wu, J. Qiu, and G. C. Fox, "MapReduce in the Clouds for Science," presented at the 2nd International Conference on Cloud Computing, Indianapolis, Dec 2010.
• T. Gunarathne, B. Salpitikorala, A. Chauhan. And G. C. Fox, “Iterative Statistical Kernels on Contemporary GPUs”. Int. J. of Computational Science and Engineering (IJCSE), 2013 Vol.8, No.1, pp.58 - 77.