LSU Releases First Open Source ParalleX Runtime Software System
From the press release:
Louisiana State University’s Center for Computation & Technology (CCT) has delivered the first freely available open-source runtime system implementation of the ParalleX execution model. The HPX, or High Performance ParalleX, runtime software package is a modular, feature-complete, and performance oriented representation of the ParalleX execution model targeted at conventional parallel computing architectures such as SMP nodes and commodity clusters.
HPX is being provided to the open community for experimentation and application to achieve high efficiency and scalability for dynamic adaptive and irregular computational problems. HPX is a library of C++ functions that supports a set of critical mechanisms for dynamic adaptive resource management and lightweight task scheduling within the context of a global address space. It is solidly based on many years of experience in writing highly parallel applications for HPC systems.
The two-decade success of the communicating sequential processes (CSP) execution model and its message passing interface (MPI) programming model has been seriously eroded by challenges of power, processor core complexity, multi-core sockets, and heterogeneous structures of GPUs. Both efficiency and scalability for some current (strong scaled) applications and future Exascale applications demand new techniques to expose new sources of algorithm parallelism and exploit unused resources through adaptive use of runtime information.
The ParalleX execution model replaces CSP to provide a new computing paradigm embodying the governing principles for organizing and conducting highly efficient scalable computations greatly exceeding the capabilities of today’s problems. HPX is the first practical, reliable, and performance-oriented runtime system incorporating the principal concepts of ParalleX model publicly provided in open source release form.