Chapel (programming language): Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 02:54, 8 June 2009

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'''Chapel''' is a new parallel [[programming language]] being developed by [[Cray Inc.]] Chapel 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 strives 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. While Chapel borrows concepts from many preceding languages, its parallel concepts are most closely based on ideas from High-Performance Fortran ([[High Performance Fortran|HPF]]), [[ZPL (programming language)|ZPL]], and the [[Cray MTA-2|Cray MTA]]'s extensions to [[Fortran]] and [[C (programming language)|C]].