As Office Director at US National Science Foundation’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, Parashar continues to develop NSF’s strategic vision for a National Cyberinfrastructure Ecosystem for the 21st century S&E and oversees its implementation and associated programmatics. A key focus of his vision is on ensuring equitable access and democratizing its use and impact . He also leads/co-lead several of NSF’s key initiatives including Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) and Public Access, is co-chair of the US Whitehouse/OSTP led National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee on the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem (FACE), is a member of the NSRC Subcommittee on Open Science (SOS) and is part of the leadership of the COVID 19 HPC Consortium.
As Assistant Director for Strategic Computing at the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Parashar led the development of a national strategy for the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem (FACE), the establishment of the NSTC FACE Subcommittee, and the formulation of the National Strategic Computing Reserve (NSCR).
At the regional level, Parashar co-founded the New Jersey Big Data Alliance bringing together academia, government, and industry to address data challenges, and led state legislation to support this activity. At Rutgers, he led strategic planning for cyberinfrastructure, created and led the Rutgers Office of Advanced Research Computing, and founded and leads the university-wide multidisciplinary Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute. At the University of Utah, he is Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute and one of the Faculty Directors for the One Utah Data Science Hub.
Parashar served two terms as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, has served in leaderships roles on steering, organizing, and programing committees of numerous ACM and other conferences/workshops, and is on the editorial boards of key journals including the ACM Computing Surveys. He is the Founding Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (where he established its reproducibility initiative) and chaired the IEEE Computer Society Ad-Hoc Committee on Open Science and Reproducibility. He has also served in leadership roles in the various community technical committees (such as TCPP and TCSC) where his focus has been on establishing reward structures for recognizing excellence applied parallel and distributed computing, especially at the earlier career level. He has also contributed towards curriculum development.
Parashar has played a leadership role in national projects such as the Ocean Observatories Initiative facility and the Northeast Big Data Hub.