Introduction¶

The High performance Astrophysical Reconstruction and Processing (HARP) software suite is designed to serve as both a platform for production use and as a sandbox for testing new algorithms. HARP has a number of design goals, including:

• Provide serial and parallel toolkits for manipulating astrophysical data, prioritizing the tasks needed by current spectroscopic dark energy surveys.
• Abstraction of data I/O, to enable creating general analysis tools that do not depend on data formats.
• Leverage C++ language constructs (and features from BOOST) to reduce the amount of “boilerplate” code that is written and to speed up development time.
• Provide full Python language bindings to the serial toolkit.