After nine years of development HPX version 1.0.0 is being prepared to ship! The STE||AR Group is exited to share this news, and therefore, has prepared a release candidate for users to discover the improvements that have been made since the last release. We encourage established users and new comers to test it out. You can download a tarball of the release candidate here:
HPX
HPX Tutorial Announcement!
If you have been looking for an opportunity to get some hands-on experience with HPX, the High-Performance Computing Center in Stuttgart is arranging the event for you! On March 9th and 10th Thomas Heller, John Biddiscombe, and Hartmut Kaiser will be
Milestone: 500 Stars on GitHub
Gauging the interest in an open source project is often very difficult. People can be downloading and using your software without any developers being aware. Additionally, many projects may not have users in a direct sense but do provide other library and application
Vectorized C++ Parallel Algorithms with HPX
In preparation for my talk at CppCon 2016 last week I decided to have a closer look at the possibility to add vectorization to HPX’s parallel abstractions1The slides for this talk can be downloaded here. The goal was to avoid using compiler specific extensions while enabling vectorization support. At the same time, I wanted to be able to integrate this with the already existing parallel algorithms in HPX, proving again that higher level APIs and best possible performance go hand in hand in HPX.
HPX V0.9.99 Released!
Version 1.0 approaches! The STE||AR Group is proud to announce the release of HPX v0.9.99. This release is significant as HPX is nearly feature complete. Over the next several months the STE||AR Group will continue to test and polish HPX’s API and documentation. The feedback and experience gained from the community’s utilization this release will provide guidance on where to add the finishing touches for v1.0.
C++ Summer Lecture Series
When people struggle with HPX, we often find that their confusion and frustration is rooted in a lack of understanding of modern C++. In order to address this issue, the STE||AR Group @ LSU is hosting a 2016 C++ summer lecture series. These sessions will cover
HPX V0.9.99-rc1 Available
The STE||AR Group is proud to announce the first release candidate of HPX V0.9.99!
In preparation for the next major release of HPX we have put together a first release candidate. Please download one of the tarballs
- HPX V0.9.99-rc1:
File MD5 Hash zip (5.5M) 3f70d33f0ca737dc55e15e106abef259gz (3.7M) 10a0ad210ac33b5a91e25a9a375ce585bz2 (3.2M) d78657bce8435c0998648f09b280acee7z (2.8M) b109408218d5aa1320efd9fc7a0671d6
or check out the tag ‘0.9.99-rc1’ from the repository here and verify whether your code builds and runs fine when using this version.
Please see for a list of new features and fixed problems in this release here.
Please report any problems you might encounter through our ticket system.
We plan to do the final release of HPX V0.9.99 on July 15th, 2016.
HPX and Index-based C++ Parallel Loops
In Jacksonville at the winter 2016 C++ standardization meeting, Intel presented the second revision of their standardization proposal targeting index-based parallel for-loops (the latest document at the time of this writing is P0075R1). This document describes a couple of basic parallel for-loop constructs which complement the existing parallel algorithms which we have already implemented for quite some time in HPX. The following is taken from this document:
HPX and C++17
During the Jacksonville meeting of the C++ standards committee last week the so called Parallelism TS was accepted into the next official International Standard, also known as C++17. We can now expect for all major vendors of C++ compilers to implement the very same parallelism facilities as HPX has exposed for almost 2 years already!
A while back, we wrote about how HPX implements parallel algorithms. At the time of that writing, these parallel algorithms were freshly published as a WG21 Technical Specification with the goal of moving them into the main C++ International Standard at some point in the future. Since then, we have continued to work hard on implementing HPX versions of the proposed algorithms. In addition, we have added extensions in our implementation such as the “task” policy which enables asynchronous execution of the algorithm. We have also spent a lot of time tuning our implementation to make it as performant as possible. For instance, we have shown that it is possible for the relatively higher-level parallelization abstractions in HPX to match or to even outperform the performance of equivalent applications based on well-known and well-honed technologies like OpenMP.
The STE||AR Group is proud of the fact that our implementation in HPX has provided implementation, usage experience, and early feedback to the C++ committee. These contributions have helped to get this specification into the new standard. We hope to continue to be a flexible and valuable testbed for all future standardization proposals relating to parallelism and concurrency.
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: