A core belief of the STE||AR Group is that, in order to be successful in our efforts to revolutionize computing, we must garner the support and enthusiasm of the broader community. We were pleased to learn that a software engineer in Germany, Harris Brakmic, wrote a great blog post about witting applications in HPX. One section of his post that we were very excited about was his conclusion: Continue reading
As HPC shifts its long range focus from peta- to exascale, the need for programmers to be able to efficiently utilize the entirety of a machine’s compute resources has become more paramount. This has grown increasingly difficult as most of the Top500 machines utilize, in some capacity, hardware accelerators like GPUs and coprocessors which often require special languages and APIs to take advantage of them. In C++ the concept of executors, as currently discussed by the C++ standardization committee, has created a possibility for a flexible, and dynamic choice of the execution platform for various types of parallelism in C++, including the execution of user code on heterogeneous resources like accelerators and GPUs in a portable way. This will also allow to develop a solution that seamlessly integrates iterative execution (parallel algorithms) with other types of parallelism, such as task-based parallelism, asynchronous execution flows, continuation style computation, and explicit fork-join control flow of independent and non-homogeneous code paths. Continue reading
The STE||AR Group is proud to announce the release of HPX v0.9.11! In this release our team has focused on developing higher level C++ programming interfaces which simplify the use of HPX in applications and ensure their portability in terms of code and performance. We paid particular attention to align all of these changes with the existing C++ Standards or with the ongoing standardization work. Other major features include the introduction of executors and various policies which enable to customize the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of task and data placement. Continue reading
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Grant Mercer and I had the opportunity to present our talk, ‘Parallelizing the STL’, at Cppcon 2015. We both consider ourselves lucky for being able to attend the conference. The buzz of the atmosphere and C++ community was truly exciting to witness. Attendees were both from all over the world and performance critical industries ranging from gaming and finance to scientific computing. As Jon Kalb highlighted in his talk, C++ is receiving a resurgence for several performance related reasons: Moore’s Law is coming to end and the subsequent shift to multi-core architectures, increased computational demands from the private sector, and the rise of power constrained mobile architectures. Combined with the interest in the standardization process, C++17 and beyond, there was a palpable excitement. Continue reading
As a build up for our Supercomputing tutorial, the STE||AR Group has put together a promotional video to generate interest in HPX. The video gives viewer a high level overview of what HPX is and what will be discussed at the tutorial. The SC15 Tutorials Committee will circulate this and other tutorial videos on its YouTube playlist. We would like to thank our colleague Randy Dannenberg and his students for helping us put this together!
Howdy! The STE||AR Group welcomes you to participate in a hands on HPX tutorial which will be given this year in Austin, Texas as part of the SC Tutorials program. STE||AR Fellows from Louisiana State University, Friedrich-Alexander Universitat, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and University of Oregon will present “Massively Parallel Task-Based Programming wih HPX” which will consist of five parts: Continue reading
By: Daniel Bourgeois
The STE||AR Group has implemented executors in HPX which, as proposed by the C++ standardization proposal called ‘Parallel Algorithms Need Executors’ (document number N4406), are objects that choose where and how a function call is completed. This is a step in the right direction for HPX and parallelism because executors give more flexibility on how and where task based work should be accomplished and gives the programmer a means to compose executors nicely with execution policies inside of algorithm implementations. Continue reading
The STE||AR Group is proud to announce the release of HPX v0.9.10! In this release our team has focused on making large scale runs simple and reliable. With these changes we have currently shown the ability to run HPX applications on up to 24,000 cores! Other major features include new parcel-port (network-layer) implementations, variadic template support, more parallel algorithms, and the first distributed data structure, hpx::vector. Continue reading
The STE||AR Group is proud to announce that it has been accepted as a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code 2015 (GSoC) program! This program pays students to work on open source projects for three months over the summer. While the timeline is short, the experience can leave a lasting impression. In fact, some of us met professionally through past GSoC programs. The next step in the process is for students who wish to participate to write proposals for the work that they would like to do over the summer. To get some ideas of what STE||AR projects are available, please checkout our GSoC Project Ideas page here. We encourage all interested students to contact us with their questions and project ideas at hpx-users@stellar.cct.lsu.edu. We are looking forward to a great summer of code!
The STE||AR Group is proud to announce a new formal release of HPX (V0.9.8) — a C++ runtime system for parallel and distributed applications of any scale. While this release is mainly based on contributions made by partners of the STE||AR Group from the Louisiana State University Baton Rouge (LA, USA) and the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen (Germany), it would not have been possible without the help of many people from all over the world. Thanks to everybody involved!
Please see here for the release notes.
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