Midnight Tiger
Contents
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.
Chapel Overview
Though it would be impossible to give a thorough introduction to Chapel in the space of this article, the following characterizations of the language should serve to give an idea of what we are pursuing:
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.
