HPX documentation#

Welcome to the HPX documentation!

If you’re new to HPX you can get started with the Quick start guide. Don’t forget to read the Terminology section to learn about the most important concepts in HPX. The Examples give you a feel for how it is to write real HPX applications and the Manual contains detailed information about everything from building HPX to debugging it. There are links to blog posts and videos about HPX in Additional material.

You can find a comprehensive list of contact options on Support for deploying and using HPX. Do not hesitate to contact us if you can’t find what you are looking for in the documentation!

See Citing HPX for details on how to cite HPX in publications. See HPX users for a list of institutions and projects using HPX.

There are also available a PDF version of this documentation as well as a Single HTML Page.

What is HPX?#

HPX is a C++ Standard Library for Concurrency and Parallelism. It implements all of the corresponding facilities as defined by the C++ Standard. Additionally, in HPX we implement functionalities proposed as part of the ongoing C++ standardization process. We also extend the C++ Standard APIs to the distributed case. HPX is developed by the STE||AR group (see People).

The goal of HPX is to create a high quality, freely available, open source implementation of a new programming model for conventional systems, such as classic Linux based Beowulf clusters or multi-socket highly parallel SMP nodes. At the same time, we want to have a very modular and well designed runtime system architecture which would allow us to port our implementation onto new computer system architectures. We want to use real-world applications to drive the development of the runtime system, coining out required functionalities and converging onto a stable API which will provide a smooth migration path for developers.

The API exposed by HPX is not only modeled after the interfaces defined by the C++11/14/17/20 ISO standard. It also adheres to the programming guidelines used by the Boost collection of C++ libraries. We aim to improve the scalability of today’s applications and to expose new levels of parallelism which are necessary to take advantage of the exascale systems of the future.

What’s so special about HPX?#

HPX exposes a uniform, standards-oriented API for ease of programming parallel and distributed applications.
It enables programmers to write fully asynchronous code using hundreds of millions of threads.
HPX provides unified syntax and semantics for local and remote operations.
HPX makes concurrency manageable with dataflow and future based synchronization.
It implements a rich set of runtime services supporting a broad range of use cases.
HPX exposes a uniform, flexible, and extendable performance counter framework which can enable runtime adaptivity
It is designed to solve problems conventionally considered to be scaling-impaired.
HPX has been designed and developed for systems of any scale, from hand-held devices to very large scale systems.
It is the first fully functional implementation of the ParalleX execution model.
HPX is published under a liberal open-source license and has an open, active, and thriving developer community.