Welcome to Chapel's inaugural newsletter! The Chapel programming language community is at an inflection point with more and more people developing parallel applications in Chapel, users starting to use Chapel for vendor-neutral GPU support and our community size growing at an increased rate. For this reason, it seems timely to launch a newsletter celebrating recent highlights from throughout the Chapel community. Our quarterly newsletters will bring you the recent developments from the Chapel community. If you know of highlights that we missed here or that should be included in future newsletters, please let us know on Discourse or Gitter. You can also reply to this post.
Read on for highlights, recent presentations and publications, and blog articles and upcoming events.
Highlights
- Chapel 2.1 is released! Read this blog article for a summary of the highlights.
- ChapelCon '24 was a success. We had nearly 50% more participation compared to CHIUW '23. Read this blog article for a summary of ChapelCon '24, or visit its website for all the slides and recordings including Chapel and Arkouda tutorials.
- Alternatively check out this YouTube playlist to find all recordings in one place.
- Paul Sathre's ChapelCon Keynote was one for the ages. Paul presented "A Case for Parallel-First Languages in a Post-Serial, Accelerated World". Slides and the recording are available.
- Chapel was mentioned in Spelunking the HPC and AI Software Stacks on HPCWire.
- Chapel has been accepted into E4S: A Software Stack for HPC-AI Applications. Chapel builds are expected to first appear in the E4S 24.11 release this November.
- We kicked off monthly Office Hours and live Demo Sessions. You can find details under Upcoming Events and our brand-new Community Calendar.
- All demo sessions are recorded and can be found in this playlist.
- We kicked off monthly meetups about teaching Chapel. See this announcement if you are interested in teaching Chapel.
- During Issues Week in July, Chapel developers at HPE closed 145 public issues, the oldest of which had been open for 7 and a half years!
Recent Presentations and Publications
- Jade Abraham and Engin Kayraklioglu gave the talk and demo "Vendor-Neutral GPU Programming in Chapel" in the most recent HPE Developer Community Meetup. Slides and the recording are available.
- Josh Milthorpe presented "Performance Portability of the Chapel Language on Heterogeneous Architectures" at the Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (HCW), part of IPDPS 2024.
- Guillaume Helbecque presented "GPU-Accelerated Tree-Search in Chapel: Comparing Against CUDA and HIP on Nvidia and AMD GPUs" at Parallel / Distributed Combinatorics and Optimization, part of IPDPS 2024.
- Brad Chamberlain gave the talk "The Value of Languages in Parallel Computing" at The Pacific Northwest Programming Languages and Software Engineering (PNW PLSE) Workshop. Slides and the recording are available.
- David Bader gave the Keynote talk "Arachne: An Open-Source Framework for Interactive Massive-Scale Graph Analytics" at the Charm++ 2024 Workshop.
- Ben McDonald gave the tutorial "Data Science Beyond the Laptop: Handling Data of Any Size with Arkouda" at Cray User Group (CUG) 2024.
- Thomas Rolinger presented "Adaptive Prefetching for Fine-grain Communication in PGAS Programs" at IPDPS 2024.
- Andy Stone presented "Portable Support for GPUs and Distributed-Memory Parallelism in Chapel" at Cray User Group (CUG) 2024.
- Brad Chamberlain and Engin Kayraklioglu gave talks at Microsoft, Google and AMD.
From the Chapel Blog
- Brad Chamberlain authored "Doing science in Python? Wishing for more speed or scalability?"
- Andy Stone authored "Parallel Processing of a Billion Rows of Data in Chapel"
- This article covers a Chapel Implementation of the One Billion Row Challenge
- Engin Kayraklioglu authored "Reflections on ChapelCon '24: A Community Growing Together"
- Jeremiah Corrado authored "Navier-Stokes in Chapel — 2D Simulations and Performance"
- This article is an exploration of Chapel’s scientific computing capabilities using the CFD Python Tutorial and a C++/OpenMP performance comparison
- Daniel Fedorin authored "Generic Linear Multistep Method Evaluator using Chapel"
Upcoming Events
- Tiago Carneiro will present "Investigating Portability in Chapel for Tree-based Optimization on GPU-powered Clusters" at Euro-Par 2024 on August 28th.
- Next Chapel Office Hour is scheduled for August 22nd.
- Jeremiah Corrado will demonstrate using Parallel IO in Chapel at the next Chapel Demo Session on September 5th.
- Chapel 2.2 is planned to be released on September 26th.
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