HPX – An open source C++ Standard Library for Parallelism and Concurrency

To achieve scalability with today’s heterogeneous HPC resources, we need a dramatic shift in our thinking; MPI+X is not enough. Asynchronous Many Task (AMT) runtime systems break down the global barriers imposed by the Bulk Synchronous Programming model. HPX is an open-source, C++ Standards compliant AMT runtime system that is developed by a diverse international community of collaborators called The Ste| |ar Group. HPX provides features which allow application developers to naturally use key design patterns, such as overlapping communication and computation, decentralizing of control flow, oversubscribing execution resources and sending work to data instead of data to work. The Ste| |ar Group is comprised of physicists, engineers, and computer scientists; men and women from many different institutions and affiliations, and over a dozen different countries. We are committed to advancing the development of scalable parallel applications by providing a platform for collaborating and exchanging ideas. In this paper, we give a detailed description of the features HPX provides and how they help achieve scalability and programmability, a list of applications of HPX including two large NSF funded collaborations (STORM, for storm surge forecasting; and STAR (OctoTiger) an astrophysics project which runs at 96.8% parallel efficiency on 643,280 cores), and we end with a description of how HPX and the Ste| |ar Group fit into the open source community.