So I'm Greg Becker, I'm going to talk a bit about the high performance software foundation,
which is a relatively new umbrella organization under the Linux Foundation launched at the
ISC conference last year.
So we collectively as a community in HPC generate a lot of open source software, and this
is through sort of pure open source models and through or through community-driven open source
models and through institution-driven open source models.
And a lot of it is coming from the institutional side, right?
The US-XSKL computing project built nearly 100 projects, 80 plus Europe and Japan are
beginning their own major software efforts, and a lot of this is open source software
that is useful in HPC, it's useful into the AI and ML world, et cetera.
And we want to make sure that this software is actually useful to the world and not just
to the organizations that originate the projects, because if you build something open source
that just works for you, that's great, it helps you, but you could help everyone else as
well.
And we see with the use of super computing of HPC style workloads in AI and ML workflows that
the HPC software can have a much broader impact than maybe it could at a previous
point in time.
And a lot of the institution-based software that we develop, we have struggled historically
to transition it to a community-based model.
And then potential users look at our software and they wonder, well, if the institution
that originally wrote this is supporting it, great, but if not, I don't know if the project
is going to survive, or I don't know if this project will be here in five years, I don't
know if someone's going to randomly decide to close source this.
Obviously, if we have those concerns, we're never going to develop the sort of open source
communities that we want to see.
So what is the high-performance software foundation?
It is a neutral home for HPC open source software under the Linux Foundation.
The variety of HPC projects can be put into the high-performance software foundation.
And by joining the Linux Foundation, you give the intellectual property for the project
to the Linux Foundation and the Linux Foundation owns it.
And essentially, the Linux Foundation is the guarantor that this project is not going somewhere
else.
You can't hijack the community that build, if I build a project and you all join the
community, I can't then hijack that project and turn it into something that wasn't
what you thought you were signing up for.
And so this provides a little bit of a better guarantee for people who are joining the
project and hopefully can help us build the sorts of community around these projects that
we want to.
So what sort of software is in HPF so far?
It really runs the entire spectrum of HPC software.
We have Warpex is a simulation code and application for HPC.
We've got a variety of sort of DevOps sorts of tools, performance portability libraries,
solvers, everything in HPC we've got in the HPF at this point.
And we do not want this to be picking winners.
We can have five projects that do the same thing in the HPF if they're all open source
projects that are working towards the right sort of openness and community guidelines.
So you can see we have Charlie Cobb and AppTainer already, which do very similar things.
So we expect that that sort of overlap is going to continue.
So I'll talk a little bit about the structure of HPF as an organization and then I will
come back to talking about what it's like for a project joining because I think that's
where most of our interests are in this room.
So the HPF is funded by the member projects, the member projects pay to be members at the
various tiers and that money is the primary funding for the foundation.
So the associate tier is only open to, I don't know why you look as flying in from
the side, but the associate tier is only open to government and educational institutions
and then the other sorts of institutions have to join at the higher levels if they choose
to.
The governing board is managed by the members and determines how the foundation spends
its money.
The technical advisory council is composed primarily of the projects but also with some
representation from the members and makes the technical decisions.
The technical advisory committee will not make the technical decisions for your project.
We are not going to tell you what to do.
The technical advisory committee makes technical decisions on what our recommendations
should be, what does it take to be a project, what are the best practices for projects in
the foundation, that's the sort of technical decisions that we're making.
And then the technical advisory council also stands up working groups to work on cross-cutting
issues.
So one thing that we might be using this funding for is to provide continuous integration
on HPC hardware for the projects that join.
And here's how the representation works.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that.
It's important, but it's not the most fun.
So what does it look like for a project to join HPCF and what is the project life cycle?
There are two things that this life cycle provides us.
One, it's a signal to people who might want to use the project.
I know this project is in the established life cycle stage with the HPCF.
That tells me something about what I get as a user in terms of stability.
And on the other side, it provides a growth path for projects where here's some best practices,
here's some ideas of what you need to do to build the community around your project that
you want to build.
So there are three primary stages of the life cycle plus an emeritus stage.
The sandbox stage is quite open.
This is projects that are committed to open governance and working towards best practices.
If you want to build community around your project and you are at HPC project relevant
to the foundation, we want to get you in the door.
We're not going to be gatekeeping the sandbox stage all that aggressively.
The requirements are mainly the requirements necessary to be a Linux foundation project.
At the established stage, that's saying something about the establishment of a user community
for the project, primarily.
You have good development practices such that users can trust the project and you are a
project that is used in production.
At the core stage, now we're talking about projects that have achieved the sort of long-term
community-based stability that's the goal of the HPSF.
So I'm not going to read off these requirements, but just to kind of rehash what this
is.
This is basically you are a Linux foundation project and you're in the HPC space and you
want to work towards having a stable community.
The big one here is used successfully in production by at least three independent users
and good development practices.
This is a project that has achieved some sort of user community.
The core project criteria, a little bit stricter, we're looking at projects that have
a governing body and have no single institution controlling the governing body.
So this is the sort of project that you can trust even if the founding institution were
to stop supporting it.
There is a community around that project that can maintain it in the long run.
If you are a project that's interested in joining, what you need to do is talk to the members
of the technical advisory council, find two sponsors and then it's a GitHub issue and a
presentation to the tech and there's a vote to join HPSF but then also a vote on what
phase you would join at.
So you could join at core already if you already have that sort of community more likely
at the established or sandbox stage.
If you're interested in joining as a member, either for your institution or because you're
just an incredibly generous individual, talk to me, I can put you in touch with the right
people.
And then the last thing that I want to talk about is we are having the first HPSF conference.
So one of the things that HPSF is using with its funding is we're having a conference,
this is going to be two days of plenary talks about HPSF and sort of high-level talks
from the individual projects and then two days for project meetings for the individual
projects where those communities can come together.
And so this is one of the things that you can get out of joining HPSF is help with running
these sorts of events for your project.
And that's all I've got.
Thanks a lot for having time for questions here.
If you want to have questions on this, be a safe, be a safe, be a great outside, and we'll
switch straight to the next talk.