Z-level programming language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 15:07, 25 December 2012

Revision as of 08:35, 11 January 2013

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| website = [http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/zpl/home/ www.cs.washington.edu] (zpl)

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'''ZPL''' (short for ''Z-level Programming Language'') is an [[array programming language]] designed to replace C and C++ programming languages in engineering and scientific applications .<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/zpl/overview/overview.html|accessdate=17 December 2012|title=ZPL Home Page}}</ref>. Because its design goal was to obtain [[cross-platform]] high performance, ZPL programs run fast on both [[sequence|sequential]] and [[parallel computer]]s. Highly-parallel ZPL programs are simple and easy to write because it exclusively uses [[implicit parallelism]].

Originally called ''Orca C'', ZPL was designed and implemented during 1993-1995 by the Orca Project of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington.

ZPL uses the array abstraction to implement a [[Data parallelism | data parallel]] programming model. This is the reason why ZPL achieves such good performance: having no [[parallel directives]] or other forms of explicit parallelism, ZPL exploits the operational trait that when aggregate computations are described in terms of arrays, many scalar operations must be (implicitly) performed to implement the array operations. This ''implied'' computation can be automatically allotted to different processors to achieve concurrency: Parallelism arises from the semantics of the array operations.

ZPL is translated into a conventional [[abstract syntax tree]] representation on which [[program analysis]] and [[optimization (computer science)|program optimizations]] are performed. [[ANSI C]] code is generated as the object code. This C program (which is machine independent because it implements certain operations in abstract form) is then compiled using the native C compiler on the [[target machine]] with custom libraries optimized to the specific platform.

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==External links==

* {{official website|http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/zpl/home/}}

[[Category:Array programming languages]]