We are pleased to announce Kokkos has officially graduated to become a Core Project of the High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF). Following a comprehensive review, the HPSF Technical Advisory Council (TAC) voted unanimously to advance Kokkos from the Established Stage to the Core Stage, the highest maturity level a technical project can achieve within the Foundation.
This graduation is a testament to the maturity, widespread adoption, and vibrant open source community that has grown around the Kokkos ecosystem over the years. But what exactly does this mean for the future of performance portability and the broader HPC landscape?
The HPSF Project Lifecycle & Evaluation Process
At HPSF, our project lifecycle framework, comprising Emerging, Established, and Core stages, serves as a roadmap for open source software maturity. These stages are not a measure of code quality alone, but rather reflect a project’s health as a community: its governance robustness, contributor diversity, security posture, and adoption across the HPC landscape.
When a project joins HPSF, it undergoes an evaluation by the TAC, composed of project leads and premier member representatives. To ensure continuous growth and alignment, HPSF requires periodic re-reviews. Moving to the Core Stage requires meeting strict organizational and technical criteria:
-
- Have a defined governing body of four or more owners/core maintainers, with no more than half affiliated with the same employer, and no single institution controlling a voting majority.
- Have a documented, publicly accessible description of its governance, decision-making, and release processes.
- Have a healthy number of committers from at least two organizations.
- Have explicitly defined security reporting and incident mitigation processes.
- Provide evidence of widespread adoption in the HPC ecosystem.
- Receive a 2/3 majority vote from the TAC.
From Founding Project to HPSF Core
Kokkos originally joined HPSF as one of its founding technical projects in 2024, entering directly at the Established Stage. Since then, the project team has actively worked with HPSF to formalize governance, broaden adoption, and elevate community health to a first-class engineering concern.
The TAC’s review highlighted several accomplishments that made Kokkos a prime candidate for Core status:
- Deep Ecosystem Adoption: Sustained production reliance across national laboratories and open science communities, including Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories (Sierra code suite, Empire, SPARC), major open-science applications (LAMMPS, Trilinos, E3SM, PETSc, Viskores), and international partners like the CEA.
- Sustained Engineering Velocity: Hundreds of pull requests merged across Kokkos Core and Kokkos Kernels, along with earning the OpenSSF Best Practices “Passing” badge across subprojects, participation in the OpenSSF Scorecard program (Scorecard reports obtain 8.7 and 9.2 out of 10, respectively), and the Kokkos team is continuously working on improving practices.
- Institutional Diversity: An expanding contributor base, with the CEA joining Sandia and Oak Ridge National Laboratory as major institutional contributors, alongside growing initiatives at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
- Community Leadership: Leaders participating in the CSCCE Birdaro Training Program and presenting practical insights in Performance Portability for People: The Kokkos Community Playbook at HPSFCon 2026.
What This Graduation Means for HPSF and the Community
For HPSF, welcoming Kokkos to the Core Stage reinforces the Foundation’s mission to steward critical, multi-institutional open source infrastructure. It shows that our lifecycle model successfully guides projects toward long-term sustainability, vendor neutrality, and community resilience.
For Kokkos users, downstream maintainers, and application teams, day-to-day interactions with the codebase remain seamless. However, Core Stage status demonstrates:
- Growth Track Record: Recognition from peers Kokkos’ commitment to remain open, stable, and vendor-neutral.
- Foundation Integration: Proven HPSF leadership and cross-project integration with HPSF initiatives.
- A Proven Model: A blueprint for other HPSF projects aiming to scale their governance and community health.
Looking Ahead
Graduation to Core status is not a finish line; it is a commitment to sustained excellence. As hardware architectures become increasingly complex, performance portability remains central to high-performance computing. HPSF is proud to support the Kokkos project as it continues to drive innovation in parallel programming.
Read more on the Kokkos blog. Thank you to every contributor, maintainer, and partner organization whose dedication made this milestone possible!
Interested in contributing to Kokkos? Visit: https://kokkos.org/