Hello, I’m

Pasindu
Tennage

Doctoral Researcher at EPFL

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ABOUT ME

ABOUT ME

Hi There! I'm Pasindu Tennage

I am a distributed systems engineer and researcher. I completed my Computer Science degree at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, where I began my early research on neural machine translation for low-resourced languages. I then pursued a Master's degree at the same university, focusing on distributed and cloud computing. During my Master's, I worked on load balancing, microservices performance characterization, and server architectures.

In 2019, I started my PhD at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, where I focus on robust and resilient consensus protocols. My work involves designing new consensus protocols, implementing them, and conducting extensive evaluations in real-world setups.

I am currently seeking industry job opportunities in the following roles: Blockchain Researcher, Distributed Systems Researcher, or Software Engineer specializing in Distributed Systems.

Outside of research, I enjoy a simple life. I spend time playing with my puppy, weightlifting, playing musical instruments, and hanging out with my friends.

MY SKILLS

MY SKILLS

Technical Skills
  • Consensus
  • BFT
  • Distributed Systems
  • Blockchains
  • Scalability
  • Technical Writing
  • Web3 Systems
  • Performance Evaluation
  • Network Security
  • Fault-Tolerant Systems
  • Data Structures and Algorithms
  • Concurrent Programming
Programming and Scripting Languages
  • Go (Expert)
  • Rust
  • Java
  • Python
  • C
  • SQL
  • Latex
  • Bash
Tools
  • AWS EC2
  • Git
  • Linux
  • NetEm

Professional Journey

Professional Journey

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Education

Ph.D. Computer and Communication Sciences (GPA: 5.56/6.0)

09/2019 – 03/2025

● École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
● Awarded the EDIC PhD fellowship for 2019 - 2020.
● Advised by Bryan Ford and co-advised by Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias.
● Thesis: Robust and Efficient Wide-Area Consensus Protocols.

Master’s Degree, Computer Science and Engineering (GPA: 4.2/4.2)

02/2018 – 08/2019

● University of Moratuwa, Colombo, Sri Lanka
● Thesis: Analyzing and Modelling Web Server based Systems.

Bachelor’s Degree, Computer Science and Engineering (GPA: 4.13/4.2)

02/2014 – 12/2017

● University of Moratuwa, Colombo, Sri Lanka
● Awarded the Gold medal for the highest GPA among 700 engineering undergrads across all disciplines at the University of Moratuwa.
● Awarded the Mahapola Scholarship.
● Thesis: Neural Machine Translation for Sinhala-Tamil.

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Experience

Research Assistant

03/2020 – present
  • Decentralized and Distributed Systems Laboratory, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
  • Conducted research and developement of new secure replicated consensus protocols that deliver high performance and robustness under both synchronous and adversarial network conditions.
  • Conducted high-quality, impactful research, with publications in ACM SOSP.
  • Delivered invited talks at top workshops, including IC3.
  • Collaborated on blockchain execution architecture research and performance analysis.
  • Collaborated with Mysten Labs on secure and high performance blockchain consensus protocol research and development.
  • Key skills: Distributed Algorithms, Consensus Protocols, System Design, Performance Tuning, Research, Technical Writing, go-lang, Rust, python, bash, AWS EC2.

Scientific Researcher

03/2022 – 08/2022
  • Institute of Science and Technology (ISTA), Austria
  • Conducted research and development of scalable and high performance state machine replications systems.
  • Led the design and implementation of a novel asynchronous consensus protocol and a leaderless scalable overlay network.
  • Key skills: Distributed Algorithms, Consensus Protocols, System Design, Scalablity, Research, Technical Writing, go-lang, python, bash, AWS EC2.

Graduate Teaching Assistant

03/ 2020 – 01/2025
  • École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
  • Served as the head teaching assistant for the Master's course Decentralized Systems Engineering (CS438), which was attended by approximately 100 students annually.
  • Created homework materials and provided guidance on building distributed systems during final semester projects.
  • Prepared exam materials and participated in grading for the final semester exams.
  • Key skills: Teaching, Mentoring, Supervision, Debugging, Technical Writing, go-lang.

Research Assistant

09/2019 – 03/2020
  • Dependable Systems Lab, EPFL, Lausanne Switzerland.
  • Conducted research and development of high speed Software Network Functions.
  • Designed, developed, and tested a custom concurrent hash table in C language to reduce the lantecy of Network Address Translation.
  • Conducted experiments in a high speed cluster and optimized the system for high performance.
  • Key skills: Data Structures and Algorithms, Software Engineering, Performance Evaluation, Performance Tuning, Research, Technical Writing, C.

Software Engineer

05/2018 – 08/2019
  • CTO office, WSO2, Sri Lanka.
  • Conducted research and developement of Java micro services performance characterization.
  • Led the development of a new workload characterization tool for Java microservices, that enables automatic performance evaluation of different micro services architectural patterns.
  • Conducted high-quality and impactful research and published in top-tier conferences including HPCC 2019 and ICWE 2020.
  • Key skills: Performance Evaluation, Research, Technical Writing, Java, AWS EC2, Bash, Python.

Visiting Instructor

2017 March – 2018 May
  • University of Moratuwa, Colombo, Sri Lanka
  • Prepared homework materials and exams for Theory of Computing, Computer Networks, and Concurrent Programming courses.
  • Guided undergraduate students in designing and building multi-threaded applications as part of the Software Architecture course.
  • Key skills: Lecturing, Mentoring, Project Supervision, Java.

Intern Software Engineer

07/2016 – 12/2016
  • Identity server team, WSO2, Sri Lanka.
  • Led the implementation of a new UI feature for the WSO2 Identity Server that was later included in WSO2’s commercial product.
  • The feature I implemented significantly enhances the product’s usability by enabling automatic updates of SAML metadata, eliminating the need for manual insertion.
  • Key skills: Java, Git.
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News

  • 2025 January: I presented “Mahi-Mahi: Low-Latency Asynchronous BFT DAG-Based Consensus” in the IC3 2025 blockchain conference, Engelberg.
  • 2024 October: “Mahi-Mahi: Low-Latency Asynchronous BFT DAG-Based Consensus” is available online.
  • 2024 April: I participated in the EuroSys 2024 conference in Athens.
  • 2024 April: “RACS and SADL: Towards Robust SMR in the Wide-Area Network” is available online.
  • 2024 January: I was invited to deliver a talk on distributed consensus at the IC3 Winter Conference in Les Diablerets, Switzerland.
  • 2023 October: I presented "QuePaxa: Escaping the Tyranny of Timeouts in Consensus" at SOSP 2023 in Koblenz, Germany.
  • 2022 April: “Baxos: Backing off for Robust and Efficient Consensus” is available online.
  • 2022 March: I joined the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) as a Scientific Researcher for a 5.5-month internship in the SPIDERS lab.
  • 2020 September: I joined the DEDIS Lab at EPFL as a PhD researcher specializing in distributed systems.
  • 2019 September: I began my PhD as a fellowship student at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Computer Science and was awarded the EDIC PhD Fellowship for one year.
  • 2019 August: I completed my Master's thesis titled "Analyzing and Modelling Web Server-Based Systems" at University of Moratuwa.
  • 2018 October: I was awarded the Gold Medal for achieving the highest GPA in the Computer Science and Engineering Department's graduating class of 2017.
  • 2018 May: I joined WSO2 as a Software Engineer.
  • 2018 February: I began my Master's degree at the University of Moratuwa.
  • 2017 December: I completed my Bachelor's degree at the University of Moratuwa and submitted my thesis titled "Neural Machine Translation for Sinhala-Tamil".
  • 2016 July: I started my internship at WSO2, working with the Identity Server team.
  • 2014 March: I began my Bachelor's degree at the University of Moratuwa, Faculty of Engineering.
  • 2013 January: I was ranked 22nd in the GCE A/L All-Island Examination.
  • 2009 December: I was ranked first in the graduating class of Thurstan College in the GCE O/L All-Island Examination.

Contact Info

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