The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization that enables mass innovation through open source, has announced its intention to create the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF). Through a series of technical projects, the HPSF aims to build, promote, and evolve a portable software suite for high-performance computing (HPC) by increasing adoption, reducing barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts.
Specifically, the HPSF will provide developers with resources for continuous integration, architectural support and regression testing, and performance benchmarking.
According to the Linux Foundation, HPC has taken off due to the increasing adoption of scientific computing and artificial intelligence. By providing a neutral space for HPC projects, the organization hopes that industry, academia and governments will be able to collaborate.
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.
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
