History

The development of High Performance ParalleX (HPX) began in 2007. At that time, Hartmut Kaiser became interested in the work done by the ParalleX group at the Center for Computation and Technology (CCT), a multi-disciplinary research institute at Louisiana State University (LSU). The ParalleX group was working to develop a new and experimental execution model for future high performance computing architectures. This model was christened ParalleX. The first implementations of ParalleX were crude, and many of those designs had to be discarded entirely. However, over time the team learned quite a bit about how to design a parallel, distributed runtime system which implements the concepts of ParalleX.

From the very beginning, this endeavour has been a group effort. In addition to a handful of interested researchers, there have always been graduate and undergraduate students participating in the discussions, design, and implementation of HPX. In 2011 we decided to formalize our collective research efforts by creating the STE||AR group (Systems Technology, Emergent Parallelism, and Algorithm Research). Over time, the team grew to include researchers around the country and the world. In 2014, the STE||AR Group was reorganized to become the international community it is today. This consortium of researchers aims to develop stable, sustainable, and scalable tools which will enable application developers to exploit the parallelism latent in the machines of today and tomorrow. Our goal of the HPX project is to create a high quality, freely available, open source implementation of ParalleX concepts for conventional and future systems by building a modular and standards conforming runtime system for SMP and distributed application environments. The API exposed by HPX is conformant to the interfaces defined by the C++ ISO Standard and adheres to the programming guidelines used by the Boost collection of C++ libraries. We steer the development of HPX with real world applications and aim to provide a smooth migration path for domain scientists.

To learn more about STE||AR and ParalleX, see People and Why HPX?.