This week the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced the launch of the High Performance Software Foundation, which "aims to build, promote, and advance a portable core software stack for high performance computing" (or HPC) by "increasing adoption, lowering barriers to contribution, and supporting development efforts."
It promises initiatives focused on "continuously built, turnkey software stacks," as well as other initiatives including architecture support and performance regression testing. Its first open source technical projects are:
- Spack: the HPC package manager.
- Kokkos: a performance-portable programming model for writing modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way.
- Viskores (formerly VTK-m): a toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for accelerator architectures.
- HPCToolkit: performance measurement and analysis tools for computers ranging from desktop systems to GPU-accelerated supercomputers.
- Apptainer: Formerly known as Singularity, Apptainer is a Linux Foundation project providing a high performance, full featured HPC and computing optimized container subsystem.
- E4S: a curated, hardened distribution of scientific software packages.
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. The High Performance Software Foundation will provide a neutral space for pivotal projects in the high performance computing ecosystem, enabling industry, academia, and government entities to collaborate on the scientific software.
The High Performance Software Foundation benefits from strong support across the HPC landscape, including Premier Members Amazon Web Services (AWS), Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories; General Members AMD, Argonne National Laboratory, Intel, Kitware, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and Associate Members University of Maryland, University of Oregon, and Centre for Development of Advanced Computing.
In a statement, an AMD vice president said that by joining "we are using our collective hardware and software expertise to help develop a portable, open-source software stack for high-performance computing across industry, academia, and government." And an AWS executive said the high-performance computing community "has a long history of innovation being driven by open source projects. AWS is thrilled to join the High Performance Software Foundation to build on this work. In particular, AWS has been deeply involved in contributing upstream to Spack, and we're looking forward to working with the HPSF to sustain and accelerate the growth of key HPC projects so everyone can benefit."
The new foundation will "set up a technical advisory committee to manage working groups tackling a variety of HPC topics," according to the announcement, following a governance model based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
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