The High Performance C++ consortium is a group that has been working for the last two years on the design of a standard library for parallel programming based on the C++ language. The consortium consists of people from research groups within Universities, Industry and Government Laboratories. The goal of this effort is to build a common foundation for constructing portable parallel applications. The design has been partitioned into two levels. Level 1 consists of a specification for a set of class libraries and tools that do not require any extension to the C++ language. Level 2 provides the basic language extensions and runtime library needed to implement the full HPC++ Level 1 specification.