HPSF Gets Off to a Strong Start in Taking HPC Software Mainstream

The newly formed High-Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) is already up and running with tools to bring HPC software to the mainstream.

Hardware used in supercomputers is now making its way to cloud and personal computers, and the “impact of supercomputing software doesn’t have to be limited to supercomputers,” said Todd Gamblin, a distinguished member of technical staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, during an SC2024 technical session.

HPSF aims to popularize the HPC software stack and drive adoption across computing domains. The technical session at SC2024 aimed at educating attendees about the new organization.

The stack includes an HPC package manager called Spack, which LLNL developed; the HPC C++ library Kokkos, which parallelizes code execution; and HPCToolkit, which can be valuable in tuning code across accelerated systems.

“What we’re trying to do is work upstream and facilitate collaboration between those projects, so they’re coordinated… and we can sustain the HPC software ecosystem,” Gamblin said.

The intent to establish HPSF was announced at Supercomputing 2023 and was formally established in May at ISC. It operates within the Linux Foundation and has 16 members, with LLNL, AWS, HPE, and Sandia National Laboratory as premier members.

“We’re trying to grow membership of HPSF around the world,” Gamblin said. Other members include C-DAC, India’s supercomputing center, and Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich.

HPSF is taking a practical approach to reach its goals by providing access to software and hardware resources. HPSF collaborates with other organizations, including CNCF for cloud computing and OpenSSF for security.

HPSF welcomes open-source HPC software projects, which will go through a vetting process as part of a Project Lifecycle initiative.

Each project will be classified by importance based on the level of engagement and sustainability. The classification will help users determine project relevance, trustworthiness, and popularity.

“We have a collaboration with OpenSSF and might have more best practices that we want to be tracking in this process,” said Greg Becker, a staff member at LLNL.

Users can also submit projects to HPSF for consideration, which will then be evaluated by a committee based on categories including governance and development practices.

The HPSF technical session also included a presentation from the first working group focused on CI/CD, a software development procedure emphasizing continuous development, deployment, testing, and updates to code bases. The iterative technique involves quick testing, security checks, and bug fixes.

“We need to be able to test these projects if we are going to make them maintainable for people and reusable and port them to new architectures as new things come out,” said Alex Scott, a staff member at LLNL.

Scott said the group will provide access to the GitLab repository to run CI/CD operations and hardware such as GPUs from Nvidia or AMD. This approach is similar to the SPACK CI GitLab system.

HPSF will hold its first conference in Chicago from May 5 to 8, 2025. The organization’s website is now live at hpsf.io.

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