Chapel (programming language)

Chapel is a new parallel programming language developed by Cray.^[1] It is being developed as part of the Cray Cascade project, a participant in DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) program, which has the goal of increasing supercomputer productivity by the year 2010. Chapel aims to improve the programmability of parallel computers in general and the Cascade system in particular, by providing a higher level of expression than current programming languages do and by improving the separation between algorithmic expression and data structure implementation details.

Chapel, the Cascade High Productivity Language, supports a multithreaded parallel programming model at a high level by supporting abstractions for data parallelism, task parallelism, and nested parallelism. It enables optimizations for the locality of data and computation in the program via abstractions for data distribution and data-driven placement of subcomputations. It allows for code reuse and generality through object-oriented concepts and generic programming features. For instance, Chapel allows for the declaration of locales.^[2]

While Chapel borrows concepts from many preceding languages, its parallel concepts are most closely based on ideas from High-Performance Fortran (HPF), ZPL, and the Cray MTA's extensions to Fortran and C.

It is being developed as an open source project, under the BSD license^[3].

References

1. ^ Modular programming languages: 7th Joint Modular Languages Conference by David E. Lightfoot 2006 ISBN 3540409270 page 20
2. ^ Bongen Gu; Wikuan Yu; Yoonsik Kwak (June 28-30, 2011). "Communication and Computation Overlap through Task Synchronization in Multi-locale Chapel Environment". In James J. Park, Laurence T. Yang and Changhoon Lee. Future Information Technology, Part I: 6th International Conference. Loutraki, Greece: Springer-Verlag. pp. 285-292. ISBN 978-3-642-22332-7. http://www.worldcat.org/title/future-information-technology-6th-international-conference-futuretech-2011-loutraki-greece-june-28-30-2011-proceedings-part-i/oclc/743288033?title=&detail=&page=frame&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.doi.org%2F10.1007%2F978-3-642-22333-4%26checksum%3D2f368965a4018fb8f195284f641951bd&linktype=digitalObject. Retrieved August 17, 2011. 
3. ^ Chapel Sourceforge project page

See also

• Unified Parallel C
• Fortress
• Co-array Fortran
• X10
• Partitioned global address space

External links

• The Chapel Project
• Chapel Specification (version 0.785)
• 99 bottles of beer in Chapel