Spreading the Word

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:

C++ and the Heterogeneous Challenge

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.