It is time to announce the participants for in the STE||AR Group’s 2020 Google Summer of Code! We are very proud to announce the names of those 5 students this year who will be funded by Google to work on projects for our group.
HPX Community Survey
The HPX Community Survey was conducted to gauge user experiences regarding usefulness and functionality, purpose of use, and ease of use of HPX. Submissions were collected through 03/05/2020, and 33 total responses were received.
GSoD Final Report
By Rebecca Stobaugh.
We’ve reached the end of Google’s Season of Docs, and we’ve accomplished a lot in the past three months. My initial proposal was to work on three sections of the manual, and we have far exceeded our goal, managing to make changes to twelve different sections of the documentation. The majority of the work I’ve done has consisted of cleaning up grammatical errors and improving sentence structure. I have also added a style guide to the wiki, which should help standardize future changes to the documentation. The style guide can be found in the “HPX Source Code Structure and Coding Standards” wiki document under the section “Documentation Style Guide”. For a complete list of my pull requests during Season of Docs, please see here. To view my changes to the wiki, please see here.
Announcing HPX’s Season of Docs
By Rebecca Stobaugh
HPX was recently selected to be part of Google’s Season of Docs (GSoD), a program designed to improve the documentation of open source software. While the STE||AR Group has created extensive documentation for HPX, this documentation has been written by several different people, which has led to some inconsistencies and awkward organization. I am a technical writer and English PhD student who has been selected to edit and streamline HPX’s documentation. My goal is to clean up the content, concentrating on both grammatical issues and design concerns, to create a more cohesive, user-friendly product. My primary focus will be on two sections of the STE||AR Group’s instruction manual: “HPX Build System” and “Launching and Configuring HPX Applications.” If time allows, I will also revise the “Why HPX” page, with an emphasis on condensing and trimming repetitive content.
You can read my GSoD proposal here.
Trip Report: ICML 2019
By: Bita Hasheminezhad
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) which is the premier gathering of professionals dedicated to the advancement of machine learning. Thirty-Sixth ICML was held on June 9th to 15th at the Long Beach Convention Center.
Trip Report: C++Now 2019
By Weile Wei
From May 5th to 10th, I was in Aspen, CO attending my first C++Now conference. I was able to participate as a student volunteer, and I was able to give a lightning talk about C++ Distributed Object Abstraction using HPX.
HPX 1.3.0 Released!
The STE||AR Group is proud to announce the release of HPX 1.3.0! This release focuses on performance and stability improvements. Make sure to read the full release notes to see all new and breaking changes. Thank you once again to everyone in the STE||AR Group and all the volunteers who have provided fixes, opened issues, and improved documentation.
Download the release from our download page, or GitHub page.
HPX accepted for Google Season of Docs 2019
This year Google is organizing for the first time Google Season of Docs (GSoD). Like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) the program aims to match motivated people with interesting open source projects that are looking for volunteer contributions. GSoD, however, aims to improve open source project documentation, which often tends to get less attention than the code itself. We recognize this all too well in the HPX project. For this reason, we decided to apply for GSoD and can now proudly announce that HPX has been selected as one of 50 projects participating in this year’s GSoD!
This means that we are now looking for motivated people to help us improve our documentation. If you have some prior experience with technical writing, and are interested in working together with us on making the documentation of a cutting edge open source C++ library the best possible guide for new and experienced users, this is your chance. You can read more about the program on the official GSoD home page. We’ve provided a few project ideas on our wiki, but you can also come up with your own. Our current documentation can be found here.
The deadline for technical writer applications is June 28. Come talk to us about your ideas and your application on our mailing list, IRC, or Slack. We’d love to hear from you!
HPX 1.2.1 Released!
The STE||AR Group is proud to announce the release of HPX 1.2.1. This is a patch release which fixes implementation and packaging bugs, as well as adds support for Boost 1.69.0. Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this release, both with bug reports and fixes.
Download the release from our download page, or GitHub page.
HPX documentation now uses Sphinx
With the release of HPX 1.2.0 we moved from a Boostbook-based documentation system to Sphinx. The latest documentation is now hosted on GitHub pages and can be found here.
There were multiple reasons for moving to a Sphinx-based documentation setup:
- Modern look: the Boostbook-based documentation used awkward, non-responsive styling
- Search: Sphinx natively supports search which makes it much faster to find what you’re looking for in the documentation
- Table of contents in sidebar: this also helps navigating the documentation more easily
- More familiar markup with reStructuredText
While the above are mostly visual reasons for moving to Sphinx, we used the opportunity to restructure the documentation at the same time. The first page of the documentation now tries to guide new and old users to sections that they might be interested in. For new users there is a quick start guide since we know that starting out with HPX can often be a big hurdle (to help with that there are also HPX packages available on Fedora). Our examples have been labeled with what you will learn by reading through the examples. For more advanced users the comprehensive manual has been restructured in a more logical way to start from getting and building HPX, to writing single-node HPX applications, multi-node HPX applications, and finally to optimizing and debugging applications. We’ve also added a new section for developers getting started with HPX. A less noticeable feature is that we link key concepts to our terminology page. Next time you see a term you haven’t seen before you’ll hopefully be able to just click the word to get an explanation.
We hope you enjoy the new documentation and would love to hear your feedback on it!