At HPSFCon 2025 in Chicago, leaders from across the community tackled the exact challenges HPSF is organizing to address: how to build open standards that don’t just look good on paper but actually help developers ship reliable, performant code.
Read below for a summary of the Birds of a Feather (BoF) session focused on the current state and future direction of the HPSF community. Led by Julien Bigot, joined by Ansar Calloo, Nur Fadel, Todd Gamblin, Angelica Loshak, John Mellor-Crummey, Julia Plews, Andy Warner, and Bill Hoffman. Audience members submitted questions, and the panel answered them live during the BoF.
Watch the full video here.
1. Openness ≠ Simplicity
Standards help avoid vendor lock-in, but they’re often convoluted or half-implemented. HPSF provides a structure for cleaning that up by bringing everyone to the table to identify, prioritize, and improve those gaps.
Takeaway: Open is good, but usable is better.
2. Fragmentation is very real
HPSF’s working groups directly address this, especially around programming models and packaging, by creating shared definitions and baselines for “actually works” versus “technically works.”
Takeaway: “Standardized” doesn’t mean “seamless.”
3. Sometimes hardware vendor cooperation is inconsistent
HPSF gives vendors and developers a neutral space to coordinate—reducing the chaos of one-off extensions and private optimizations that break compatibility.
Takeaway: Expect vendor-specific anomalies, and strategize to address them proactively.
4. Tooling needs to improve
As with the other panels, tooling came up fast. HPSF’s E4S project is one concrete way the foundation is improving this landscape, giving developers cross-platform visibility and control.
Takeaway: Advocate for better tools and consider creating support groups.
5. It’s a long game, but worth it
The crowd was clear: open standards aren’t optional, they’re essential. But they won’t fix themselves. HPSF is organizing the energy, structure, and support to make them real and useful.
Takeaway: It’s not always easy, but it’s necessary.
Conclusion
This BoF was a community pulse check and a solid reminder of why HPSF was created. We don’t just need standards. We need working, trustworthy, open tools and coordination. That’s the gap HPSF is filling, one meeting, one spec, and one community event at a time.
Want to get involved with HPSF? Whether you’re building software or shaping standards, there’s a place for you in the High Performance Software Foundation community. Check out working groups, contribute to open projects, or join us at future events to help push the ecosystem forward.