Linux Foundation Creating The High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF)

Kicking off an exciting Supercomputing SC23 week, The Linux Foundation announced this morning that they are forming the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) to help advance an open-source core software stack for high performance computing (HPC). Already a number of national labs, Intel, NVIDIA, and other stakeholders are involved.

The initial members joining the High Performance Software Foundation with the Linux Foundation are: Amazon Web Services, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, CIQ, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, Kitware, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory, and the University of Oregon.

Notably absent from this list that includes Intel and NVIDIA is... AMD. Quite surprising to see AMD not involved in the High Performance Software Foundation but will be interesting to see if they join later if they hadn't been invited onboard as a founding members.

The High Performance Software Foundation will be working on open-source projects such as Spack, Kokkos, AMReX, VTK-m, HPCToolkit, E4S, Charliecloud, WarpX, and other HPC-oriented codes. The expressed goals of the HPSF are:

- Serve as a neutral home for key projects in the high performance software ecosystem;
- Promote use of HPSF projects in many open source communities and organizations;
- Provide a transparent governance model that allows stakeholders from government, industry, and academia to steward the ecosystem together;
- Provide a clear path to incubate and onboard promising new projects;
- Ensure that HPC software is accessible and reliable by providing CI and turn-key builds;
- Ensure that HPC software is secure and ready for cloud through collaborations with CNCF and OpenSSF; and
- Sponsor events and training to grow a diverse, skilled workforce for software in the HPSF ecosystem.

More details on the High Performance Software Foundation via the Linux Foundation press release. The foundation's website is going to be at HPSF.io. Very interesting initiative but at the same time rather surprising such an HPC-focused open-source software foundation wasn't established years ago.