Pacific Northwest Numerical Analysis Seminar

Abstracts

Chapel is an emerging parallel programming language that strives to dramatically improve the productivity of parallel programmers from multicore desktops to supercomputers. Chapel also supports more general styles of software/hardware parallelism as compared to currently adopted parallel programming models. Chapel’s design and development are being led by Cray Inc., in collaboration with members of academia, computing centers, and industry. It is being developed in a portable, open-source manner under the BSD license. In this talk, I will provide a brief overview of Chapel’s motivating themes and central concepts. One such theme is Chapel's notion of a “multiresolution philosophy,” in which the language supports a mix of lower- and higher-level features to give programmers a spectrum of choices between explicit control and more productive abstractions. A key feature of this philosophy is that higher-level features are implemented within Chapel in terms of the lower-level concepts, ensuring that the various levels are compatible and composable.