Today, the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the intention to form the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF). Through a series of technical projects, HPSF aims to build, promote, and advance a portable software stack for high performance computing (HPC) by increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts.
As use of HPC becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. HPSF intends to leverage investments made by the United States Department of Energy’s (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP), the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and other international projects in accelerated HPC to exploit the performance of this diversifying set of architectures. As an umbrella project under the Linux Foundation, HPSF intends to provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance software ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate together on the scientific software stack.
HPSF already benefits from strong support across the HPC landscape, including leading companies and organizations like Amazon Web Services, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, CIQ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Kitware, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the University of Oregon. Drawing from supporting organizations and members of the community, HPSF will set up a technical advisory committee (TAC) to manage working groups tackling a variety of HPC topics, and will follow a governance model based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
The HPSF is launching with the following initial open source technical projects:
- Spack: the HPC package manager
- Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.
- AMReX: a performance-portable software framework designed to accelerate solving partial differential equations on block-structured, adaptively refined meshes.
- WarpX: a performance-portable Particle-in-Cell code with advanced algorithms that won the 2022 Gordon Bell Prize
- Trilinos: a collection of reusable scientific software libraries, known in particular for linear, non-linear, and transient solvers, as well as optimization and uncertainty quantification.
- Apptainer: a container system and image format specifically designed for secure high-performance computing.
- VTK-m: a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.
- HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from laptops to the world’s largest GPU-accelerated supercomputers.
- E4S: the Extreme-scale Scientific Software Stack
- Charliecloud: HPC-tailored, lightweight, fully unprivileged container implementation.
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HPSF aims to make life easier for high performance software developers through a number of focused initiatives, including:
- Continuous Integration resources tailored for HPC projects
- Continuously built, turnkey software stacks
- Architecture support
- Performance regression testing and benchmarking
HPSF representatives will be attending ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC23) on Monday, November 13 for a kickoff presentation at 8:00pm. The presentation will happen at the DOE booth on the show floor during the opening Gala, with words from HPSF founders and supporters. HPSF representatives will also be available to talk to prospective projects and members.
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