Welcome to Chapel's quarterly newsletter! This edition celebrates Chapel becoming a member of the High Performance Software Foundation! Coincidentally, it is also packed with Chapel-related events at the upcoming HPSFCon 2026. Read on for Chapel community news from SC25, HPE Discover Barcelona 2025, and more.
Highlights
- Chapel 2.7 was released! Read this blog article for a summary of its highlights
- Chapel is now a member of High Performance Software Foundation! Check out the HPSF announcement for more details
- Chapel was also featured in the HPSF Blog "Charting the Future of High Performance Software: HPSF Year in Review and What’s Ahead"
- HPSF Conference (HPSFCon) 2026 will be held March 16-20, in Chicago. There are many Chapel-related events in the schedule! Check out the next section for details of the Chapel events.
- The Chapel community was at SC25!
- Michael Ferguson presented "Comparing Distributed-Memory Programming Frameworks with Radix Sort" at PAW-ATM 2025
- Oliver Alvarado Rodriguez and Engin Kayraklioglu presented a demo on Arkouda and Chapel at the HPE Booth
- We were at HPE Discover Barcelona 2025! On December 3-4, Daniel Fedorin presented the Chapel and Arkouda projects to attendees
- Oliver Alvarado Rodriguez participated in an interview in the latest edition of 7 Questions for Chapel Users blog series
- If you want to highlight any Chapel-related achievement on our community social media accounts, please check the new Social Media Intake Form out to let us know what you have in mind!
- We surpassed 300 followers on LinkedIn!
Chapel at HPSFCon 2026
We're looking forward to HPSFCon in Chicago in March, and the opportunity to interact with the HPSF community and projects. From a Chapel perspective, events at the conference will include (all times CDT):
- Engin Kayraklioglu will present "Vendor-Neutral, Scalable GPU Programming with Chapel" on March 16th, 11:05 AM
- Daniel Fedorin will present "From Engineering to Community: Challenges for HPC Programming Language Adoption" on March 16th, 3:15 PM
- Jade Abraham will present "Paying Down Tech Debt: The Challenges of Maintaining Legacy Code in HPC" on March 16th, 4:10 PM
- Engin Kayraklioglu will be on the panel "Portable and Reproducible Benchmarks" on March 18th, 9:00 AM
- Engin Kayraklioglu will present "User Experiences Leveraging Chapel's Features for Productive Parallel Programming" on March 18th, 11:15 AM
- We will also have a half-day Chapel Project Meeting on March 18th, where:
- Jade Abraham will present "A Hands-on Introduction to Scalable Parallel Programming with Chapel" at 1:45 PM
- Engin Kayraklioglu will present "Case for Compiled Languages for HPC: Chapel Story" at 2:50 PM
- Jade Abraham will present "Chapel Tools: Where We Are and Where We Are Going" at 3:50 PM
- Daniel Fedorin will present "Evolving a Research Prototype: Dyno, Chapel's New Compiler Front-End" at 4:25 PM
- Between these scheduled sessions, we'll have time for impromptu interactions with the community.
Recent Presentations, Publications, and Demos
- Jade Abraham presented "Productive Parallel Programming with Chapel and Arkouda" at FOSDEM 2026. The video of their presentation is also available
- Jean-Philippe Valois, Guillaume Helbecque, and Nouredine Melab published "Efficient and scalable branch-and-bound algorithm for exact qubit allocation" in Future Generation Computer Systems
- Nelson Dias presented "Parallel programming languages for micrometeorological research: the case for Chapel" at the XIV Brazilian Micrometeorology Workshop
- In collaboration with many colleagues in the community, Shreyas Khandekar, Engin Kayraklioglu, and Brad Chamberlain co-authored and submitted "A Survey of Distributed Asynchronous Many-Task Models and Their Applications" for publication
- Brad Chamberlain and Jade Abraham presented "Interactive Data Science at Massive Scales using Python and Arkouda" at UW Data Science Seminar. The video of their talk and demo is also available.
- Brad Chamberlain and Engin Kayraklioglu recorded interviews for the My Open Source Experience podcast. The episodes are going to air in the coming months. Stay tuned!
- Tom Westerhout defended his Ph.D. dissertation "Applications of Novel Programming Languages and Compilation Techniques to Accelerating Quantum Many-body Science". Slides from his defense are available in the new Chapel-Related Ph.D. Dissertations section of the website.
From the Chapel Blog
In addition to the articles already mentioned above, the following articles have recently been published on the Chapel Blog:
- Thitrin Sastarasadhit authored a two-part series Transformers From Scratch in Chapel and C++
- Thitrin's articles are the first written by an external contributor! Please reach out if you want to contribute to the Chapel Blog.
- Brandon Neth authored "Reflections on ChapelCon '25"
Upcoming Events
- Engin Kayraklioglu, Daniel Fedorin, and Jade Abraham will be at HPSFCon 2026 between March 16-20
- Chapel 2.8 is scheduled to be released on March 12th
Recurring Public Meetings
- Chapel Project Meetings are every Tuesday 10AM PT / 1PM ET / 5PM UTC
- Chapel Deep-Dives and Demos slot is on Thursday 10 AM PT / 1PM ET / 5PM UTC
- This slot is available for any discussion including demos on ongoing work, live discussion on specific topics, or anything you may want to talk about with the community. Check upcoming discussion topics and dates, or propose your topic here!