Midnight Tiger
Chapel Cray
Team Information
Introduction to Chapel
Chapel(Cascade High-Productivity Language) is an alternative parallel programming language that focuses on the productivity of high-end computing systems.
- General Parallelism: Chapel has the goal of supporting any parallel algorithm you can conceive of on any parallel hardware you want to target. In particular, you should never hit a point where you think “Well, that was fun while it lasted, but now that I want to do x, I’d better go back to MPI.”
- Separation of Parallelism and Locality: Chapel supports distinct concepts for describing parallelism (“These things should run concurrently”) from locality (“This should be placed here; that should be placed over there”). This is in sharp contrast to conventional approaches that either conflate the two concepts or ignore locality altogether.
- Multiresolution Design: Chapel is designed to support programming at higher or lower levels, as required by the programmer. Moreover, higher-level features—like data distributions or parallel loop schedules—may be specified by advanced programmers within the language.
- Productivity Features: In addition to all of its features designed for supercomputers, Chapel also includes a number of sequential language features designed for productive programming. Examples include type inference, iterator functions, object-oriented programming, and a rich set of array types. The result combines productivity features as in Python™, Matlab®, or Java™ software with optimization opportunities as in Fortran or C.
Advantages of Chapel Cray
Other current parallel programming models are limited that they target to specific hardware and they only implement single type of parallelism.