Pure is a new programming model and runtime system explicitly designed to take advantage of shared memory within nodes in the context of a mostly message passing interface enhanced with the ability to use tasks to make use of idle cores. Pure leverages shared memory in two ways: (a) by allowing cores to steal work from each other while waiting on messages to arrive, and, (b) by leveraging efficient lock-free data structures in shared memory to achieve high-performance messaging and collective operations between the ranks within nodes. We use microbenchmarks to evaluate Pure’s key messaging and collective features and also show application speedups up to 2.1x on the CoMD molecular dynamics and the miniAMR adaptive mesh refinement applications scaling up to 4,096 cores.