The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of the collaborative open-source project High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF). This organization aims to consolidate efforts in creating supercomputer software and will host multiple technical projects in the future.
The alliance brings together a broad coalition of hardware manufacturers, software providers, as well as scientific and research institutions operating supercomputers. However, notably absent from the list is AMD.
Among the founding members listed in the HPSF announcement are Amazon Web Services, Argonne National Laboratory, CEA, CIQ (Rocky Linux), 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.
The absence of AMD in this lineup comes as a surprise, considering that the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s supercomputer, Frontier, utilizes AMD’s Epyc CPUs and AMD Instinct MI250X as accelerator cards, maintaining its position as the world’s fastest supercomputer.
Additionally, other systems in the current Top500 list rely on this hardware combination. The reasons behind AMD’s exclusion from HPSF are currently unclear, and it remains uncertain whether AMD will join HPSF in the future.
The primary objective of HPSF is to develop a highly portable software stack for high-performance computing. This includes collections of algorithms, libraries for scientific computations, container techniques, and package management. Particularly, considering the specialized optimized algorithms for its hardware platform, AMD should theoretically have a keen interest in this initiative.
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