Hello, and welcome to the spring 2026 edition of Chapel's newsletter!
This time around, we'll start off on a somber note, as the Chapel project has announced its need for new sources of funding, collaborations, and/or other creative ways to sustain the project and keep it healthy after this fall. For more information, please refer to our recent Chapel Project Needs New Funding blog post—and be sure to let us know if you have thoughts about how to keep the project going!
That dark cloud aside, there's lots of great activity from this past quarter to report, including the Chapel 2.8 release, a community CUG 2026 paper, several talks and presentations, new interviews with Chapel users and developers, and enhancements to the website. Read on for details!
Chapel 2.8
Chapel 2.8 was released on March 12, 2026, featuring improvements to tools, vectorization, RISC-V, AMD GPUs, and Slurm. For details, refer to the 2.8 release announcement on the Chapel blog. And thanks to everyone who contributed to version 2.8!
Energy Savings with Aggregators at CUG 2026
Georgia Tech Ph.D. student, Shubhendra Pal Singhal, published a paper at CUG 2026 studying the impact of communication aggregation on performance and energy. The results were positive for Chapel's aggregators, which consistently resulted in time and energy savings in the paper's experiments. Shubh's work was presented by HPE's Nathan Wichmann at CUG and also involved collaborators at ORNL and LANL. The paper was accepted for publication in the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series (ICPS), but has not yet been published. In the meantime, see the CUG 2026 slides for a preview.
Recent Seattle-Area Talks
This month, Jade Abraham and Brad Chamberlain gave some local presentations, available online:
- 30 Years of HPC Programming: So many hardware advances, so few broadly adopted languages by Brad at PNW PLSE 2026—a 15-minute version of his recent blog article
- Portable and Performant Explicit Vector Programming by Jade at PNW PLSE 2026
- Productive Parallel Programming at all scales with Chapel by Brad and Jade at the Northwest C++ Users' Group
Note that the first two are 10–15 minute lightning talks while the third is an in-depth session featuring a live demo of GPU computing.
New User Interviews
We've published two new installments in our 7 Questions for Chapel Users interview series:
- 7 Questions for CHAMPS Developers: Empowering Academic R&D to Create Cutting-Edge CFD Apps in Chapel with Maxime Blanchet, Karim Zayni, and Baptiste Arnould from Polytechnique Montreal
- 7 Questions for Akihiro Hayashi: Early Chapel GPU Support through Multiresolution Abstractions with our long-time colleague at Georgia Tech
Check these out and hear from Chapel programmers in their own words.
Website Enhancements
This quarter, we've made some improvements to the Chapel website including a news archive, an improved community calendar, and a brand-new page that supports interactively browsing Mason packages for use with Chapel. We've also added a page for trying Chapel from a browser using Attempt This Online or GitHub codespaces.
The website now also links to our new Chapel Slack Workspace, provided by Slack and HPSF. Come chat with us there, particularly if you prefer Slack to Discord or Gitter.
HPSFCon Talks
This quarter kicked off with a number of Chapel-related sessions at HPSFCon 2026 by Daniel Fedorin, Engin Kayraklioglu, and Jade Abraham, as previewed in our February newsletter and on the HPSF blog. Their talks spanned a number of topics, including GPU computing, language adoption, technical debt, user experiences, compiler optimizations, tools, and the Dyno compiler project. In addition, Engin participated in a benchmarking panel and Jade gave a live demo of Chapel. Slides and links to the recordings are available on the Chapel website, while non-Chapel HPSFCon sessions are available on YouTube.
"My Open Source Experience" Interviews
My Open Source Experience is a podcast by Ildikó Váncsa that's published on YouTube and standard podcast platforms, focusing on the human and socio-technical aspects of developing open-source software. Recent episodes have featured interviews with Chapel's Brad Chamberlain and Engin Kayraklioglu:
- Brad's interview: Without Collaboration This Project Won't Succeed
- Engin's interview: Life-Changing Internship
- a multi-perspective episode, Things that Matter for Building Lasting Communities, featuring:
- Brad on building community and trust
- Engin on the role of mentoring in community-building
For convenience, we've collected these long- and short-form clips in a new Chapel Interviews playlist on YouTube.
Resources
That's it for this update! For reference, here's a reminder of some general resources:
Recurring Public Meetings
- Chapel Project Meetings are every Tuesday 10AM PT
- Chapel Deep-Dives and Demos slot is on Thursday 10 AM PT
- 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!