The State of the Chapel Union Bradford L. Chamberlain, Sung-Eun Choi, Martha Dumler Thomas Hildebrandt, David Iten, Vassily Litvinov, Greg Titus Cray Inc. Seattle, WA 98164 chapel
[email protected] Abstract—Chapel is an emerging parallel programming Cray’s entry in the DARPA HPCS program concluded language that originated under the DARPA High Productivity successfully in the fall of 2012, culminating with the launch Computing Systems (HPCS) program. Although the HPCS pro- of the Cray XC30TM system. Even though the HPCS pro- gram is now complete, the Chapel language and project remain very much alive and well. Under the HCPS program, Chapel gram has completed, the Chapel project remains active and generated sufficient interest among HPC user communities to growing. This paper’s goal is to present a snapshot of Chapel warrant continuing its evolution and development over the next as it stands today at the juncture between HPCS and the several years. In this paper, we reflect on the progress that was next phase of Chapel’s development: to review the Chapel made with Chapel under the auspices of the HPCS program, project, describe its status, summarize its successes and noting key decisions made during the project’s history. We also summarize the current state of Chapel for programmers who lessons learned, and sketch out the next few years of the are interested in using it today. And finally, we describe current language’s life cycle. Generally speaking, this paper reports and ongoing work to evolve it from prototype to production- on Chapel as of version 1.7.01, released on April 18th, 2013.