HPSF Booth and BOF
Our booth was a hub for hands-on demos and in-depth discussions about open source innovation in HPC. We were able to connect with dozens of people from the wider HPC community, many of whom were actively interested in contributing projects and joining the foundation. Visitors had the chance to meet key contributors from HPSF projects and learn how to get involved. Highlights included:
- Live demonstrations of current work
- 1:1 conversations with HPSF project leads and foundation staff
- Forward-focused conversations, giving attendees a glimpse of what’s coming next and how best to engage the HPSF community
The HPSF BOF was an informal gathering to discuss shared interests and challenges within the HPC community. We explored how the High Performance Software Foundation supports scalable software development and collaboration across the HPC ecosystem. Attendees shared questions, ideas, and insights on:
- Ways to get involved in HPSF as a contributor or organization
- Updates from working groups, the Technical Advisory Council, and the Governing Board
- Opportunities for cross-community alignment on standards, reproducibility, and interoperability
This open dialogue reinforced the importance of building a strong foundation for the next era of high performance computing.
OpenCHAMI
At ISC, OpenCHAMI had its most visible showing yet. Dell Technologies officially joined the OpenCHAMI consortium, sending a clear signal of industry support for open HPC management tools. The announcement generated significant buzz on the ISC show floor, with plans on OpenCHAMI’s integration into Dell’s Omnia software.
OpenCHAMI attracted interest from more than a dozen HPC sites across three continents, including Europe, North America, and Asia. This includes leading HPC centers, national laboratories, and research institutions evaluating OpenCHAMI for their current and next-generation HPC systems.
Feedback at ISC underscored OpenCHAMI’s appeal as an open source, community-governed approach to cluster management software, prompting new procurement conversations and site evaluations.
A well-attended OpenCHAMI tutorial at ISC generated follow-up requests for additional workshops and technical sessions in both Europe and Asia, including invitations to present at major upcoming HPC conferences.
Spack
Modern scientific software stacks include thousands of packages, and use a wide variety of technologies, from C, C++, and Fortran libraries, to packages written in interpreted languages like Python and R. Scientists often need to run the same stack at different scales, ranging from their own laptop to the world’s largest supercomputers, and use different workflows for different tasks.
Developing a new feature on an application might require frequent rebuilds, and the ability to run unit tests, or some small set of end-to-end tests, with a quick turnaround. Some debug features would likely be turned on in this kind of scenario.
Building an application for a campaign of large production runs on an HPC cluster, instead, requires to leverage low-level and difficult-to-build libraries such as MPI, BLAS, and LAPACK, or integrating with vendor’s provided libraries, in order to achieve the best performance. In this case, applications are frequently built in a way that is tuned for the machine they will run on. In all these cases, building the software stack is extremely challenging, and the complexity of managing software configurations, and installing dependencies, can be an obstacle to both deployment and development.
Spack is a package manager for scientific computing. With nearly 1,500 contributors from academia, industry, and government laboratories, Spack is a broad collaboration with a wide range of use cases, from small-scale development on laptops and clusters, to software release management, to software deployment on many of the top supercomputer sites in the world. At ISC 2025, Spack successfully hosted the following sessions:
- Spack Tutorial: A hands-on session introducing Spack, a flexible package manager tailored for HPC environments.
- Spack BoF: A forum to delve deeper into Spack’s capabilities, share experiences, and discuss future developments.