Announcing the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF)

In high performance computing (HPC), where speed and efficiency are paramount, open-source software provides the load-bearing, structural support. Our community has long recognized the immense potential of collaborative development, sharing of resources, and the power of community-driven innovation.

So we’re excited to announce that we’re a Premier founding member of the new High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF). The HPSF was launched today in Hamburg at ISC’24, by the Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization that enables mass innovation through open-source. The HPSF has strong support across the HPC landscape.

Through a series of technical projects, the HPSF aims to build, promote, and advance a portable core software stack for HPC to increase adoption by lowering barriers to contribution, supporting open-source development efforts, and making HPC more accessible to all of us. We’ve seen from our work with RIKEN to extend Fugaku to the cloud how impactful this can be.

Recent years have seen extraordinary demand for HPC across domains which are critical to all of us, from climate modeling and genomics to drug-discovery and engineering design. With the emergence of machine learning and AI, there’s never been a more important task than to reinforce the structures which have made all of this possible.

How can HPSF help?

The HPSF aims to make life easier for HPC developers through a number of focused initiatives, including:

• Continuous Integration (CI) resources tailored for HPC projects
• Continuously built, turnkey software stacks
• Architecture support
• Performance regression testing and benchmarking

AWS has been supporting many of these efforts for the Spack community since 2021, leading to the launch of the Spack Rolling Binary Cache two years ago. We’ve all learned a lot from this relationship, which we hope the wider HPC open-source community will be able to benefit from, through the foundation.

First steps

One of HPSF’s first jobs is to set up the technical advisory committee (TAC) which will manage working groups tackling a variety of HPC topics. Drawing from member organizations and community participants, the TAC will follow a governance model based on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

The HPSF launches today with the following technical projects:

• 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 laptops 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.

Getting involved

The HPSF welcomes organizations from across the HPC community to become involved and help drive innovation in open-source HPC solutions.

To learn more about the HPSF, to contribute, or to become a member, you can visit the HPSF website.

The HPSF’s commitment to supporting and nurturing these vital software packages will enable the HPC community to have access to the tools and resources necessary to push the boundaries of scientific discovery. We’re thrilled to be part of it.