This week the Linux Foundation “announced the intention to form the High Performance Software Foundation.
“Through a series of technical projects, the High Performance Software Foundation aims to build, promote, and advance a portable software stack for high performance computing by increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts.”
As use of high performance computing becomes ubiquitous in scientific computing and digital engineering, and AI use cases multiply, more and more data centers deploy GPUs and other compute accelerators. The High Performance Software Foundation intends to leverage investments made by the United States Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, and other international projects in accelerated high performance computing 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.
The High Performance Software Foundation already benefits from strong support across the high performance computing 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.
Its first open source technical projects include:
- Spack: the high performance computing 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: high performance computing-tailored, lightweight, fully unprivileged container implementation.
