Chapel Overview
Chapel is an emerging parallel programming language whose design and development are being led by Cray Inc. in collaboration with academia, computing centers, and industry. Chapel's goal is to make parallel programming more productive, from high-end supercomputers to commodity clusters and multicore desktops and laptops. Chapel is being developed in an open-source manner at SourceForge and is released under the BSD license. Chapel emerged from Cray's entry in the DARPA-led High Productivity Computing Systems program (HPCS).
Chapel supports a multithreaded execution model via high-level abstractions for data parallelism, task parallelism, concurrency, and nested parallelism. Chapel's locale type enables users to specify and reason about the placement of data and tasks on a target architecture in order to tune for locality. Chapel supports global-view data aggregates with user-defined implementations, permitting operations on distributed data structures to be expressed in a natural manner. In contrast to many previous higher-level parallel languages, Chapel is designed around a multiresolution philosophy, permitting users to initially write very abstract code and then incrementally add more detail until they are as close to the machine as their needs require. Chapel supports code reuse and rapid prototyping via object-oriented design, type inference, and features for generic programming.
Chapel was designed from first principles rather than by extending an existing language. It is an imperative block-structured language, designed to be easy to learn for users of C, C++, Fortran, Java, Python, Matlab, and other popular languages. While Chapel builds on concepts and syntax from many previous languages, its parallel features are most directly influenced by ZPL, High-Performance Fortran (HPF), and the Cray MTA™/Cray XMT™ extensions to C and Fortran.