Shared memory parallelism in Modern C++ and HPX

TL;DR

This paper discusses modern C++ features and the HPX library for parallel programming, enabling high-performance code without custom extensions, and provides an overview with examples.

Contribution

It offers an overview of parallel programming in modern C++ and demonstrates how HPX supports standards-compliant high-performance parallel code.

Findings

C++ standards have evolved to support parallel programming on a single node

HPX provides cutting-edge implementations of these standards

Parallel programming can be achieved without custom language extensions

Abstract

Parallel programming remains a daunting challenge, from the struggle to express a parallel algorithm without cluttering the underlying synchronous logic, to describing which devices to employ in a calculation, to correctness. Over the years, numerous solutions have arisen, many of them requiring new programming languages, extensions to programming languages, or the addition of pragmas. Support for these various tools and extensions is available to a varying degree. In recent years, the C++ standards committee has worked to refine the language features and libraries needed to support parallel programming on a single computational node. Eventually, all major vendors and compilers will provide robust and performant implementations of these standards. Until then, the HPX library and runtime provides cutting edge implementations of the standards, as well as proposed standards and extensions. Because of these advances, it is now possible to write high performance parallel code without custom extensions to C++. We provide an overview of modern parallel programming in C++, describing the language and library features, and providing brief examples of how to use them.