University of Utah professor and SCI director Manish Parashar has receiced the 2023 Sidney Fernbach Memorial Award “For application-aware design of HPC algorithms, systems and architectures, and transformative impact on scientific computing and industry.”


Manish’s academic career has focused on translational computer science with a specific emphasis on computational and data-enabled science and engineering, and has addressed key conceptual, technological, and educational challenges. His research is in the broad area of parallel and distributed computing, and he has investigated conceptual models, programming abstractions, and implementation architectures that can enable new insights through large-scale computations and data in a range of domains. His contributions include innovations in data structures and algorithms, programming abstractions and systems, and systems for runtime management and optimization, and he has developed and deployed software systems based on his research. He has also deployed and operated large scale production systems, such as the cyberinfrastructure for the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative.

Parashar’s more recent research has targeted the dynamic interactions and data-intensive couplings required by application workflows involving multiple interacting processes. Since these processes can run at different spatial and temporal scales, levels of parallelism and locations, expressing required couplings using existing programming systems is extremely challenging. Parashar’s research has developed dynamic, semantically specialized shared-space abstractions, which enables the online indexing of large data streams so that they can be flexibly queried to support runtime coupling, interactions, and coordination. This work has been deployed in software systems including the DataSpaces data staging service, which is being used on some of the largest systems in the world. For example, DataSpaces has enabled large-scale tightly coupled parallel fusion simulations. DataSpaces also supports in-situ/in-transit data processing and analytics and uses machine-learning-based autonomic runtime approaches to manage extreme-heterogeneity and application-level dynamism. DataSpaces, as part of ADIOS, was awarded a 2013 R&D 100 Award.

Manish Parashar

Manish is Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute, Chair in Computational Science and Engineering, and Presidential Professor in the Kalhert School of Computing at the University of Utah.

Manish recently completed an IPA appointment at the US National Science Foundation (NSF), serving as Office Director of the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. At NSF, he oversaw strategy and investments in national cyberinfrastructure and led the development of NSF’s strategic vision for a National Cyberinfrastructure Ecosystem and blueprints for key cyberinfrastructure investments. He also served as Co-Chair of the National Science and Technology Council’s Subcommittee on the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem (FACE) and the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force. In 2002, Manish served as Assistant Director for Strategic Computing at the Whitehouse Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he led strategic planning for the Nation’s Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem, and the formulation of the National Strategic Computing Reserve (NSCR) concept.

Manish is the founding chair of the IEEE Technical Community on High Performance Computing (TCHPC), and is Fellow of AAAS, ACM, and IEEE. For more information, please visit http://manishparashar.org.

Sidney Fernbach Award

Established in 1992 in memory of Sidney Fernbach, one of the pioneers in the development and application of high-performance computers for the solution of large computational problems. This award is presented for outstanding contributions in the application of high performance computers using innovative approaches.

The award will be formally presented to Manish in November at Supercomputing 2023.

You can read the interview with Manish here