Chapel programming language
Encyclopedia
Chapel is a new parallel programming language
developed by Cray
. 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
.
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.
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....
developed by Cray
Cray
Cray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer based in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. , was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation , in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995,...
. It is being developed as part of the Cray Cascade project, a participant in DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems
High Productivity Computing Systems
High Productivity Computing Systems is a DARPA project for developing a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems for national security and industry in the 2002-2010 timeframe....
(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
Generic programming
In a broad definition, generic programming is a style of computer programming in which algorithms are written in terms of to-be-specified-later types that are then instantiated when needed for specific types provided as parameters...
features. For instance, Chapel allows for the declaration of locales
Locale (computer hardware)
In computer architecture a locale is an abstraction of the concept of a localized set of hardware resources which are close enough to enjoy uniform memory access....
.
While Chapel borrows concepts from many preceding languages, its parallel concepts are most closely based on ideas from High-Performance Fortran (HPF
High Performance Fortran
High Performance Fortran is an extension of Fortran 90 with constructs that support parallel computing, published by the High Performance Fortran Forum . The HPFF was convened and chaired by Ken Kennedy of Rice University...
), ZPL, and the Cray MTA
Cray MTA-2
The Cray MTA-2 is a Shared-Memory MIMD computer marketed by Cray Inc. It is an unusual design based on the Tera computer designed by Tera Computer Company. The original Tera computer turned out to be nearly un-manufacturable due to its aggressive packaging and circuit technology...
's extensions to Fortran
Fortran
Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...
and C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
.
It is being developed as an open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
project, under the BSD license.
See also
- Unified Parallel CUnified Parallel CUnified Parallel C is an extension of the C programming language designed for high-performance computing on large-scale parallel machines, including those with a common global address space and those with distributed memory...
- Fortress
- Co-array FortranCo-array FortranCo-array Fortran , formerly known as F--, is an extension of Fortran 95/2003 for parallel processing created by Robert Numrich and John Reid in 1990s...
- X10X10 (programming language)X10 is a programming language being developed by IBM at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center as part of the Productive, Easy-to-use, Reliable Computing System project funded by DARPA's High Productivity Computing Systems program...
- Partitioned global address spacePartitioned global address spaceIn computer science, a partitioned global address space is a parallel programming model. It assumes a global memory address space that is logically partitioned and a portion of it is local to each processor. The novelty of PGAS is that the portions of the shared memory space may have an affinity...