C++Now

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This year the STE||AR Group attended the annual C++Now conference in Aspen, Colorado.  Three members of the group gave talks at the conference, which is dedicated to the discussion, development and spread of C++ and Boost Libraries.  Hartmut Kaiser and Vinay Amatya presented “HPX: A C++ Standards Compliant Runtime System for Asynchronous Parallel and Distributed Computing”, while “Boost.Asio and Boost.Serialization: Design Patterns for Object Transmission” was presented by Bryce Adelstein-Lelbach.  In addition, we were able to send two students, Michael LeSane and Alexander Duchene, through the C++Now’s Student Volunteer Program.  This program waived the conference fee for select students that volunteered to help run the conference.  In addition, the LSU Center for Computation & Technology agreed to cover the room and board of these students.  “Volunteering at the 2013 C++ Now convention was a fantastic experience,” reported Alexander Duchene, “although the talks can be seen online, nothing can compare to being surrounded by over a hundred C++ enthusiasts.”

New Mailing Lists

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All of our HPX mailing lists will be migrated to new mailing addresses. These mailing lists are the heart of the HPX community. You may read the lists via full-content email, email digests, or via newsgroup reader.

The hosting for the mailing lists is donated by the Center of Computation and Technology at Louisiana State University.

We created three new mailing lists:

HPX Users Mailing List

This list is oriented toward casual users of the HPX libraries. It is a good place to start if you are having trouble getting started with HPX. Feel free to post both “newbie” and more challenging questions. This list is relatively low volume. Subscribe or unsubscribe at the HPX Users list home page. To post to the list send mail to
hpx-users@stellar.cct.lsu.edu. We will migrate all subscribers of the current GoPX mailing list to this new list.

Main HPX Mailing List

This is the main HPX mailing list. It has a higher volume, is very technical, and oriented toward HPX library developers. It is also read by many other members interested in watching the HPX library development process. Virtually all decisions, major or minor, technical or otherwise, are reached via public discussion on this mailing list. Subscribe or unsubscribe at the HPX list home page. To post to the list send mail to
hpx-devel@stellar.cct.lsu.edu.

HPX Github Commit Messages (read only)

The HPX Commits mailing list receives messages about commits to the HPX Github repository. All current subscribers of the px-commit mailing list will be migrated to this new list.

Developing HPX with Git: A Tutorial

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EDIT: Heller pointed out that “newer subversion versions come with a single .svn directory in the top level directory; the single .git is not the reason why you can have multiple local branches”. And along with his advise to use Git over SSH instead of HTTPS and to deploy the public key with github.com.
EDIT2: revise the “feature change” section and improve workflow.

 

The HPX code base has moved from SVN to Git at github.com. This post is meant to serve as a tutorial to help with the transition.

SVN vs. Git – the Repo Conceptual Difference

From git-scm.com:

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

The distributed nature is reflected in the differences of repo models. As summarized by Ole Morten Amundsen, with a few edits:

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A Scalable Backend for True MMORPGs – HPX at GTC

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Currently the GPU Technology conference is ongoing. Together with the HPX Backend for LibGeoDecomp Andreas Schäfer submitted a poster about a scalable MMORPG design which eventually will use HPX to make it scale. The title of the poster is A Scalable Backend for True MMORPGs.

Also, don’t miss Andreas’ talk S3299 – From Notebooks to Supercomputers: Tap the Full Potential of Your CUDA Resources with LibGeoDecomp on thursday in room 211A form 16:00 to 16:25 if you happen to attend the conference.

Solving Combination Puzzles – An example HPX application – Part 1

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HPX is great for developing applications that run both in a shared memory and distributed memory environment. This is accomplished by leveraging the Active Global Address Space (AGAS). By creating components in AGAS we gain the ability to seamlessly write parallel object oriented applications without the need to manually care about passing messages to different localities of explicitly creating threads. While this idea sounds great it is difficult to think about an implementation which achieves exactly that. As such this blog post is trying to walk you through the development of a recursive back tracking brute force solver for combination puzzles and you will discover that recursion allows us in general to exploit parallelism.

This is the first post in a series. This article series will walk you through the complete lifecycle of an HPX application. From the first basic idea, which is covered in this post to a full fledged HPX application exploiting the unique features of HPX to write programs with a unified semantic for local and possibly remote access to objects. The idea to develop such an application was given by Andreas Schäfer who challenged me to beat his MPI implementation. We’ll see how we fared in the last post of this series.

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