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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