Sunilmohan Ranta
Sunil Mohan Ranta is a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIIT Hyderabad. Hacker at heart, he is known for his ability of understanding systems in no time, hence discovering their flaws and inefficiencies. He is a passionate programmer with experience in numerous languages and platforms. During his studies he got interested in GNU/Linux hacking, which later grew into serious Linux kernel hacking. He was on the founding team of IIIT.s annual online programming contest . CodeCraft in which thousands of people participate from all over the world. He was responsible for the design and development of a robust and scalable code evaluation engine which powers the online contest. The challenge was to develop a platform which can handle numerous code submissions every second with real time response rates. It also had to be resilient to possibly malicious codes submitted with the intent of bringing the system down. The engine distributes its load on a cluster of more than 50 high end computing nodes and has been successfully performing since last 5 years.
Owing to his extraordinary technical skills, he was appointed as the System Administrator to manage IIIT.s entire IT infrastructure while he was still a student. He was responsible for handling above 20 servers, including Mail server, Web server, DB server, Backup server, Proxy/Caching server, Remote File System Server, etc. He was responsible for the security of the entire infrastructure by staying up to date, applying required patches, managing Firewalls and Virtual LANs. He managed the entire network (wired and wireless) of the university comprising of thousands of computers divided in multiple subnets and VLANs. He pursued research at IIIT.s Centre for Visual Information Technology where he mastered programming on the SIMD architecture of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). He worked on parallelising various algorithms and hacking GPU for performing General Purpose Computation (GPGPU). He also led a project executed for DRDO (Defence Research & Development Organization) which involved design and development of an Aerial Mosaicing tool. The tool uses Computer Vision algorithms to create a single mosaic image from video captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV).
In his last role, he was the Co-Founder and CTO at FotoLink . a mobile startup providing platform to advertisers/publishers for adding interactivity to their print media targeting consumers with camera cell phones. He led the design and development of a patent pending Image Matching Engine and successfully implemented a methodology for real time and seamless performance on integration with MMS gateway. He also worked on various mobile Bluetooth applications like using mobile phones as input device for playing games on remote display.