See Is Intel’s ParallelAccelerator.jl still maintained? for a bunch of discussion on this. Yes, essentially ParallelAccelerator and its Julia2C is obsolete ways of getting parallelism into Julia.
That said, HPAT was a really cool project and it’s sad that was ended. But I can see why. It never really got much adoptance and relied on ParallelAccelerator which never got updated, so it would be a lot of work to get it upgraded without many users. At the same time, the release of JuliaDB kind of pushed it to the side, since JuliaDB has distributed data and computations, plus out of core support and a lot more user-focused database features like joins. Seeing that JuliaDB has JuliaComputing support, I’m not surprised the project just ended, but it was still a great technical feat to see such a fast library built using Julia+ParallelAccelerator+MPI.jl.