High Performance Software Foundation

The Linux Foundation’s home for open-source supercomputing software such as Spack, Kokkos and Open MPI, launched in May 2024 by US national laboratories, AWS, HPE and chip makers, with CNCF-style emerging, established and core stages.

1 projects in this catalogPart of the Linux Foundation 1 core Website

What it is

The High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) is part of the non-profit Linux Foundation. The LF announced its intent to form it during the SC23 supercomputing conference in November 2023 and launched it on May 13, 2024 in Hamburg, with the stated aim to “build, promote, and advance an open and portable core software stack for high performance computing”. Its premier members, then and in October 2026, are AWS, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories; general members are AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Kitware, CEA and the Argonne, Los Alamos and Oak Ridge national laboratories; and the University of Maryland, the University of Oregon and India’s C-DAC are associates. Legally it is a directed fund whose charter sets up a Governing Board, an Outreach Committee, a Government Advisory Committee and a Technical Advisory Council (TAC), with governance modelled on the CNCF.

The projects are the tools and libraries that run on supercomputers and HPC clusters: package managers and build frameworks (Spack, EasyBuild), programming models (Kokkos, Chapel, HPX), MPI (Open MPI), containers (Apptainer, Charliecloud), schedulers and cluster tools (Flux, ClusterShell, OpenCHAMI), performance tools (HPCToolkit) and simulation codes (LAMMPS, WarpX, AMReX). The launch announcement named six initial projects (Spack, Kokkos, Viskores, HPCToolkit, Apptainer and E4S), which then went through the TAC’s votes like any other. By October 2026 the TAC had voted in 23 projects: five core (Spack, Kokkos, Open MPI, LAMMPS and EasyBuild), twelve established and six emerging. The foundation’s website still showed only the first ten.

For someone choosing technology, the badge says more at the higher stages. Emerging needs little beyond two TAC sponsors and a governance document. Established requires production use by at least three independent end users and working development processes, and core a governing body where no employer holds half the seats and committers from at least two organisations, each voted on criterion by criterion with a two-thirds majority. The badge covers only projects that finished onboarding: MPICH, for example, was accepted at established in October 2026 but paused its application, so it is not an HPSF project.

Its projects in this catalog

Core1

Widely adopted projects with long-term support, a governing body of at least four with no employer holding half the seats, and committers from at least two organisations.

SpackOpen sourceThe package manager of supercomputing: it builds any of 8,600 packages from source in whatever combination of version, compiler, build options, MPI library and CPU target you ask for, installs many of them side by side and shares builds through signed binary caches.

In depth

How projects join and move#

A project opens a proposal issue in the TAC’s GitHub repository, following a template that covers its governance, licences, release process and software quality, and finds two TAC members to sponsor it. After a presentation of up to 30 minutes at a TAC meeting, the voting members discuss it in private and then vote asynchronously, criterion by criterion. Each criterion of the requested stage and every lower stage needs two-thirds of the votes cast, and the project is accepted at the highest stage where it passes all of them; the TAC can also accept it provisionally, for example pending a code of conduct or Linux Foundation approval.

The TAC reviews every project at least every 24 months through a three-member committee, which can renew it, escalate it or recommend moving it to an earlier stage; a demotion needs a two-thirds TAC vote, and the project may ask for up to 12 months to fix what is missing. In 2026 the first round of reviews moved Kokkos up to core in July and renewed Spack at core. Emeritus status needs a two-thirds vote and, where there is one, the project owners’ approval.

Who decides#

The Governing Board manages the fund. Each premier member appoints a representative; general members elect one representative for every five general members, and the TAC one for every five projects, each group capped at a quarter of the board. Board representatives other than premier appointees serve two-year terms.

The TAC is the technical body. Its voting members are one representative from each premier member and one from each project, appointed by the project’s own technical leadership; established and core projects have a binding vote on formal TAC matters such as electing board representatives. In October 2026 it was chaired by Damien Lebrun-Grandie of Kokkos and met every two weeks in public. It also runs working groups on continuous integration for HPC projects, binary packages and benchmarking.

Where it came from2023–2026

Much of the open-source HPC stack grew up in US national laboratories, and their projects had no shared, neutral home. The Linux Foundation announced its intent to form HPSF during SC23 in November 2023, with AWS, Argonne, CEA, CIQ, HPE, Intel, Kitware, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, NVIDIA, Oak Ridge, Sandia and the University of Oregon named as initial participants.

It launched at ISC in Hamburg on May 13, 2024, with six projects. Spack’s lead, Todd Gamblin of Lawrence Livermore, said joining would let the project “establish sustainable governance”. The TAC wrote a lifecycle policy borrowed from the CNCF and began voting on proposals that autumn: Kokkos, AMReX, Trilinos and WarpX were accepted as established in October 2024 and Spack as core in November.

In 2025 and 2026 the portfolio broadened from DOE codes to tools that run any HPC centre: Apptainer, Environment Modules, HPX and Charliecloud, then Flux, ClusterShell, Open MPI, LAMMPS, ReFrame and EasyBuild, another framework for building and installing HPC software. The first periodic reviews in 2026 renewed Spack at core and moved Kokkos up to it.

Why it’s built this way

Copy the CNCF’s model: HPSF says its governance is based on the CNCF’s: a board that manages the money, a technical council made up of the projects, and a staged lifecycle with a periodic review.
Vote on each criterion: A ballot lists every requirement of the requested stage and the stages below, so the TAC can accept a project at a lower stage than it asked for instead of rejecting it outright.
Working groups for shared needs: Continuous integration on HPC hardware, turnkey software stacks, architecture support and performance regression testing cut across projects, so the foundation runs them as working groups that bring projects and members together.

Timeline

2023
The Linux Foundation announces its intent to form HPSF during SC23 in November
2024
HPSF launches on May 13; the TAC accepts Kokkos, AMReX, Trilinos and WarpX in October and Spack as core in November
2025
Apptainer, Chapel, Environment Modules, HPX, Charliecloud, OpenCHAMI and others join
2026
Flux, ClusterShell, Open MPI, LAMMPS, ReFrame and EasyBuild accepted; Kokkos moves to core in July

Sources · facts checked 2026-10-28

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