STE||AR (pronounced as stellar) stands for “Systems Technologies, Emergent Parallelism, and Algorithms Research”. We decided to use this name for our group because the focus of our work has shifted over the last months. We are a group of faculty, researchers and students working at the Center of Computation and Technology (CCT) at Louisiana State University (LSU). Everything we do is centered around the ParalleX execution model and its implementation in our experimental runtime system HPX (High Performance ParalleX). We use HPX for a broad range of scientific applications, helping scientists and developers to write code which scales better and shows better performance if compared to more conventional programming models such as MPI.

ParalleX is a new (and still experimental) parallel execution model aiming to overcome the limitations imposed by the current hardware and the way we write applications today. Our group focuses on two types of applications – those requiring excellent strong scaling, allowing for a dramatic reduction of execution time for fixed workloads and those needing highest level of sustained performance through massive parallelism. These applications are either presently unable (through conventional practices) to effectively exploit a relatively small number of cores in a multi-core system. At the same time more often than not these application will not be able to exploit high-end computing systems likely to employ hundreds of millions of such cores by the end of this decade.

HPX is an experimental, modular, and performance oriented representation of the ParalleX execution model targeted at conventional architectures (currently, Linux based systems, such as SMP nodes and conventional clusters). The most important design objective of HPX is to create a state-of-the-art parallel runtime system providing a solid foundation for highly scalable applications while remaining as efficient, as portable, and as modular as possible.

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