What High Performance Software Foundation does

High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) is a nonprofit open-source foundation launched on May 13, 2024, and operating as a project under the Linux Foundation. Headquartered in San Francisco, HPSF serves as a neutral hub for open-source high-performance computing (HPC) software, stewarding a portfolio of more than 15 projects spanning programming languages (Chapel), performance portability ecosystems (Kokkos), package managers (Spack), container runtimes (Apptainer, Charliecloud), scientific computing frameworks (Trilinos, AMReX, WarpX, HPX, Flux Framework), visualization toolkits (Viskores), HPC cluster provisioning (OpenCHAMI), and developer tooling (HPCToolkit, Modules, E4S, Wi4MPI). These projects collectively address performance, portability, and productivity across heterogeneous hardware from laptops to the world's first exascale supercomputers (Aurora, El Capitan, Fugaku).

HPSF's constituents are roughly 27 member organizations spanning national laboratories (LLNL, Sandia, Argonne, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, RIKEN), hardware vendors (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Arm, HPE), cloud providers (Microsoft Azure, AWS), and research institutions, organized into Premier, General, and Associate membership tiers. Customers of the underlying software are HPC developers, computational scientists, and AI/ML researchers running scientific simulations, accelerated computing, and cloud HPC workloads. The foundation is governed by a Governing Board chaired by Todd Gamblin (creator of Spack, LLNL) and a Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), with operational scale of 51–100 employees.

HPSF's revenue model is tiered membership fees paid by member organizations, supplemented by sponsorship and event revenue from HPSFCon. The foundation does not commercialize software; all projects are distributed freely under open-source licenses via GitHub, package managers (Spack, Mason), and container registries (Apptainer). Go-to-market is community-led: growth occurs through member recruitment, project onboarding, conference presence (HPSFCon, SC, ISC, FOSDEM), and developer relations via Slack and GitHub. The foundation won the HPCwire "Best HPC Collaboration" award at SC25 in November 2025, reflecting rapid ecosystem traction only 18 months after founding.

Name

High Performance Software Foundation

Legal name

High Performance Software Foundation

Website

https://hpsf.io

Company type

Private

Founded year

2024

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

51–100 employees

Short description

High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) is a nonprofit Linux Foundation project that stewards 15+ open-source HPC software projects — including Kokkos, Chapel, Spack, and Apptainer — serving national laboratories, cloud providers, and HPC developers running exascale scientific and AI workloads.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Open-Source HPC Software

NAICS

Computer Systems Design and Related Services (5415), Computer Facilities Management Services (541513)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)

akta.pro primary industry

HPC System Software & Resource Management (Schedulers, MPI, OS Images) (HDACAOAH)

akta.pro secondary industries

Research Computing & High-Performance Computing (HPC) User Support (EDALAMAK), HPC-as-a-Product / On-Prem Managed HPC (Integrated Hardware + Ops) (HDACAOAK)

Keywords

• Open-source HPC software
• High performance computing
• Performance portability
• Scientific computing frameworks
• Parallel programming tools

Headquarters

HQ city

San Francisco

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure

Revenue model

1. Membership Fees: HPSF operates as a nonprofit foundation under the Linux Foundation, funded through tiered membership fees from premier, general, and associate member organizations including national laboratories, technology companies, and research institutions.

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

HPSF is a nonprofit foundation that provides a unified, vendor-neutral home for open-source high-performance computing software projects. It stewards a portfolio of programming languages, performance portability libraries, package managers, container runtimes, scientific frameworks, and resource management tools that enable portable, productive software across diverse hardware from laptops to exascale supercomputers. The foundation is funded through tiered membership fees and supports its community through conferences, working groups, and governance bodies.

Product overview

High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) is a neutral hub under the Linux Foundation that provides a unified home for open source high performance software projects. Rather than a single product, HPSF offers a portfolio of 15+ distinct projects including: Chapel (productive parallel programming language), Kokkos (C++ performance portability ecosystem), Spack (HPC package manager), Trilinos (scientific computing framework), AMReX (adaptive mesh refinement framework), WarpX (particle-in-cell code), Apptainer and Charliecloud (HPC container systems), HPCToolkit (performance measurement tools), E4S (software packages distribution), Modules (environment management), OpenCHAMI (cluster provisioning), Viskores (scientific visualization), HPX (ParalleX runtime), Flux Framework (resource management), and Wi4MPI (MPI interoperability). These projects collectively address performance, portability, and productivity across diverse HPC hardware from laptops to exascale supercomputers.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Chapel Open source programming language for productive parallel computing, letting developers express parallelism and data locality on laptops, clusters, clouds, or supercomputers; has scaled to over a million processor cores and thousands of GPUs.
• Kokkos Production-level C++ Performance Portability Ecosystem that lets developers write modern C++ applications in a hardware-agnostic way for CPUs, GPUs, and other accelerators with a single codebase.
• Spack Package manager for supercomputers, Linux, and macOS; supports building optimized applications with custom compiler support for production HPC clusters.
• AMReX Open-source high-performance software framework for building massively parallel, performance-portable, block-structured adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) applications with particles, embedded boundaries, linear solvers, and parallel FFTs.
• Apptainer Container platform for HPC (formerly Singularity) that simplifies creation and execution of containers for portable and reproducible execution of software components across different HPC environments.
• Charliecloud Lightweight, fully unprivileged open source container implementation for HPC that handles building images, pushing/pulling to registries, and managing accelerators such as GPUs.
• E4S Effort to provide open source software packages for developing, deploying, and running scientific applications on HPC and AI platforms, with support for NVIDIA Blackwell, AI tools, and multiple container/cloud image options.
• Flux Framework Open source modern resource management and scheduling framework for managing diverse workloads at scale from containers to supercomputers, including distributed messaging, graph-based scheduling, bank accounting, and security.
• HPCToolkit Integrated suite of tools for measurement and analysis of program performance on computers ranging from multicore desktop systems to GPU-accelerated supercomputers, with instruction-based PC sampling on AMD and Intel GPUs.
• HPX General purpose C++ runtime system for parallel and distributed applications of any scale, the first open source implementation of the ParalleX execution model extending the C++ standard library for concurrency and parallelism.
• Modules Tool for dynamically modifying shell environments on supercomputers, providing a module command to load and unload modulefiles affecting environment variables, shell aliases, and command-line completion.
• OpenCHAMI Open Composable Heterogeneous Adaptable Management Infrastructure providing cloud-like provisioning and management for on-premise HPC systems through composable microservices tailored to user needs.
• Trilinos High-performance software framework for scientific applications covering linear algebra, optimization, differential equations, and mesh generation, with modular architecture leveraging Kokkos for performance portability.
• Viskores Toolkit of scientific visualization algorithms for emerging processor architectures, particularly GPUs, providing algorithm building blocks and abstractions with rendering via ANARI API.
• WarpX Advanced Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code supporting many geometries and numerical solvers for kinetic multi-physics problems in accelerator, fusion, laser, plasma, space and astrophysics simulations, on all major GPU and CPU brands.
• Wi4MPI Open source tool for improving portability and interoperability across different MPI implementations, enabling applications built on one MPI library to run with another without recompilation.

Quantifiable outcome

• Kokkos powered applications on world's first Exascale machines (Aurora, El Capitan)
• +3 more outcomes

Named customers6 records

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Feature4 records

Partnerships

14 partnerships are on record, tiered core, premier, general and established.

• Chapel (HPE)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 17 November 2025Chapel programming language joined HPSF as established project. HPE serves as technical lead with Brad Chamberlain as distinguished technologist, supporting community governance and expansion of contributors.
• MicrosoftpremierStrategic or Co-development Partner · 14 October 2025Microsoft joined HPSF as a Premier member. As part of the Governing Board and Technical Advisory Committee (TAC), Microsoft contributes to building a strong foundation for portable, high-performance software and deepens collaboration with the broader cloud ecosystem.
• RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS)generalStrategic or Co-development Partner · 8 July 2025R-CCS, home to the supercomputer Fugaku and one of Europe's first upcoming exascale supercomputers, joined as General member. R-CCS contributes to HPSF Technical Advisory Committee and shapes direction of HPSF projects and priorities.
• Kokkos Team (Sandia, Oak Ridge, CEA)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 1 January 2025Kokkos joined HPSF at the Established project level with contributions from Sandia National Laboratories, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and CEA. Kokkos powered applications on world's first exascale machines (Aurora, El Capitan).
• Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)premierStrategic or Co-development PartnerLLNL serves as Premier member and hosts Governing Board Chair Todd Gamblin. LLNL contributes to multiple projects including Spack, Kokkos, and WarpX.
• Sandia National LaboratoriespremierStrategic or Co-development PartnerSandia serves as Premier member and contributes leadership to Kokkos (Christian Trott), Trilinos, and Charliecloud projects.
• NVIDIAgeneralStrategic or Co-development PartnerNVIDIA joined as General member supporting HPC ecosystem development. Marc Joos, Senior Solutions Architect at NVIDIA, contributed to Wi4MPI project.
• AMDgeneralStrategic or Co-development PartnerAMD joined as General member, contributing to HPC software portability across AMD GPU architectures.
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)generalStrategic or Co-development PartnerHPE joined as General member. Jade Abraham (HPE) contributes to Chapel project governance and technical debt management discussions.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)premierStrategic or Co-development PartnerAWS joined as Premier member with Heidi Poxon serving on Governing Board. AWS contributes to cloud HPC initiatives and HPC ecosystem development.
• CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission)generalStrategic or Co-development PartnerCEA joined as General member and transferred stewardship of Modules project to HPSF. CEA emerged as major Kokkos contributor alongside Sandia and Oak Ridge.
• Linux FoundationcoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerHPSF operates as a project under the nonprofit Linux Foundation, providing neutral governance, administrative infrastructure, and established open-source stewardship frameworks.
• OpenCHAMI ConsortiumcoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerOpenCHAMI joined HPSF as emerging project with consortium including Los Alamos National Laboratory, Dell Technologies (joined at ISC 2025), and HPE. First production deployment at LANL in February 2025.
• Modules Project (Environment Modules)establishedStrategic or Co-development PartnerModules (Environment Modules) joined HPSF as established project, transferred from CEA stewardship. Tool helps users dynamically modify shell environment on supercomputers with 22,000+ integration tests.

Scale indicators5 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Direct peers

• NumFOCUS: Nonprofit that stewards scientific open-source projects (NumPy, SciPy, Jupyter, pandas) under a similar fiscal-sponsorship/patron model. Directly comparable as a foundation whose value is sustaining open-source scientific/HPC-adjacent software.
• OpenJS Foundation: Linux Foundation sub-foundation that stewards Node.js, jQuery, and other JavaScript projects using the same tiered membership and Governing Board model as HPSF.
• Python Software Foundation: Nonprofit foundation stewarding the Python language ecosystem via membership and grants. Comparable governance/operating model applied to a widely adopted open-source programming platform adjacent to HPC.
• Eclipse Foundation: Foundation hosting open-source projects with working-group governance and corporate membership. Comparable as a vendor-neutral steward of developer-facing infrastructure software, though with a broader scope than HPC.
• Apache Software Foundation: Long-established open-source foundation using tiered membership and the Apache License model. HPSF applies the same membership-governed stewardship pattern, making Apache the canonical reference peer for foundation-level governance.
• SchedMD: Commercial maintainer of SLURM, the dominant open-source HPC workload manager. Comparable as a competing stewardship model for an HPC resource manager (Flux Framework is HPSF's counter); contrasting for-profit vs. foundation model.
• RISC-V International: Open-standard organization for the RISC-V instruction set with tiered membership, Governing Board, and technical committees. Strongly comparable governance structure applied to an adjacent (hardware) layer of the HPC stack.

Others

• Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF): Linux Foundation cross-industry effort for open-source supply-chain security. Thematically related through HPSF's stated collaboration on secure supply chain for HPC software.

Broad incumbents

• Altair Engineering: Commercial HPC software vendor owning PBS Works (PBS Pro scheduler) and other HPC engineering tools. Comparable as an incumbent offering HPC workload-management and scheduling software competing with HPSF's Flux Framework project.
• Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF): Linux Foundation sub-foundation for cloud-native projects (Kubernetes, etc.). Sister foundation under the LF umbrella; HPSF explicitly cites CNCF as a collaboration partner for cloud HPC convergence, making it the closest incumbent peer.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xbsky.app/profile/hpsf.bsky.social
• GitHubgithub.com/hpsfoundation
• YouTubeyoutube.com/@HPSF-community
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/hpsf

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles1 record

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about High Performance Software Foundation