HPX, short for High Performance ParalleX, is a runtime system for

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

. It is currently under active development by the STEAR group at

Louisiana State University Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as Louisiana State University (LSU), is an American Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louis ...

. Focused on

scientific computing Computational science, also known as scientific computing, technical computing or scientific computation (SC), is a division of science, and more specifically the Computer Sciences, which uses advanced computing capabilities to understand and s ...

, it provides an alternative execution model to conventional approaches such as

MPI MPI or Mpi may refer to: Science and technology Biology and medicine * Magnetic particle imaging, a tomographic technique * Myocardial perfusion imaging, a medical procedure that illustrates heart function * Mannose phosphate isomerase, an enzyme ...

. HPX aims to overcome the challenges MPI faces with increasing large

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s by using

asynchronous Asynchrony is any dynamic far from synchronization. If and as parts of an asynchronous system become more synchronized, those parts or even the whole system can be said to be in sync. Asynchrony or asynchronous may refer to: Electronics and com ...

communication between nodes and lightweight control objects instead of global barriers, allowing application developers to exploit

fine-grained Granularity (also called graininess) is the degree to which a material or system is composed of distinguishable pieces, "granules" or "grains" (metaphorically). It can either refer to the extent to which a larger entity is subdivided, or the ...

parallelism. HPX is developed in idiomatic

C++ C++ (, pronounced "C plus plus" and sometimes abbreviated as CPP or CXX) is a high-level, general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup. First released in 1985 as an extension of the C programmin ...

and released as open source under the

Boost Software License Boost is a set of library (computing), libraries for the C++ programming language that provides support for tasks and structures such as linear algebra, pseudorandom number generator, pseudorandom number generation, multithreading, image proces ...

, which allows usage in commercial applications.

Applications

Though designed as a general-purpose environment for high-performance computing, HPX has primarily been used in * Astrophysics simulation, including the

N-body problem In physics, the -body problem is the problem of predicting the individual motions of a group of astronomical object, celestial objects interacting with each other gravitationally.Leimanis and Minorsky: Our interest is with Leimanis, who first d ...

neutron star A neutron star is the gravitationally collapsed Stellar core, core of a massive supergiant star. It results from the supernova explosion of a stellar evolution#Massive star, massive star—combined with gravitational collapse—that compresses ...

evolution, and the merging of stars **Octo-Tiger, An astrophysics application simulating the evolution of star systems. * LibGeoDecomp, A Library for Geometric Decomposition codes * Simulation crack and fractures utilizing

Peridynamics Peridynamics is a Nonlocal operator, non-local formulation of continuum mechanics that is oriented toward deformation (engineering), deformations with discontinuities, especially fractures. Originally, ''bond-based'' peridynamic was introduced, ...

*Phylanx, A Library for Distributed Array Processing

References

External links

HPX/STEAR Group Homepage

HPX GitHub repository

STEAR Group Blog

STEAR Group Publications
{{Parallel computing Parallel computing C++ libraries