# Chapel Newsletter: May 2026 **URL:** \ **Category:** Newsletters\ **Created:** [May 29, 2026, 7:07pm UTC](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-may-2026/49962 "2026-05-29T19:07:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![bradcray](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/chapel.discourse.group/bradcray/32/72_2.png) [@bradcray](https://chapel.discourse.group/u/bradcray)\ **Post date:** [May 29, 2026, 7:07pm UTC](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-may-2026/49962/1 "2026-05-29T19:07:42Z")
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**](https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/cff/) 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](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-may-2026/49962#p-62076-chapel-28-1), a community [CUG 2026 paper](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-may-2026/49962#p-62076-energy-savings-with-aggregators-at-cug-2026-2), several [talks](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-may-2026/49962#p-62076-recent-seattle-area-talks-3) and [presentations](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-may-2026/49962#p-62076-hpsfcon-talks-6), new interviews with Chapel [users](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-may-2026/49962#p-62076-new-user-interviews-4) and [developers](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-may-2026/49962#p-62076-my-open-source-experience-interviews-7), and [enhancements to the website](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-may-2026/49962#p-62076-website-enhancements-5). 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**](https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/announcing-chapel-2.8/) on the Chapel blog. And thanks to [everyone who contributed](https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/blob/release/2.8/CONTRIBUTORS.md) 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**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/CUG2026_Aggregators+Energy.pdf) 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**](https://youtu.be/xb45unGdc6s?si=2uPnxw7sMPJapMFc) by Brad at [PNW PLSE 2026](https://pnwplse.org/)—a 15-minute version of his [**recent blog article**](https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/30years/) - [**Portable and Performant Explicit Vector Programming**](https://youtu.be/N4Z69Gwab94?si=E6oRZMs2-A_-yBxg) by Jade at [PNW PLSE 2026](https://pnwplse.org/) - [**Productive Parallel Programming at all scales with Chapel**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations-archived/#artifact-nwcpp26) by Brad and Jade at the [Northwest C++ Users' Group](https://nwcpp.org/) 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](https://chapel-lang.org/blog/series/7-questions-for-chapel-users/) interview series: - [**7 Questions for CHAMPS Developers:** Empowering Academic R&D to Create Cutting-Edge CFD Apps in Chapel](https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/7qs-champs/) with Maxime Blanchet, Karim Zayni, and Baptiste Arnould from Polytechnique Montreal - [**7 Questions for Akihiro Hayashi:** Early Chapel GPU Support through Multiresolution Abstractions](https://chapel-lang.org/blog/posts/7qs-hayashi/) 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**](https://chapel-lang.org/news/), an improved [**community calendar**](https://chapel-lang.org/calendar/), and a brand-new page that supports interactively [**browsing Mason packages**](https://chapel-lang.org/packages/) for use with Chapel. We've also added a page for [**trying Chapel**](https://chapel-lang.org/tryit/) from a browser using [Attempt This Online](https://ato.pxeger.com/run?1=m70sOSOxIDVnwYKlpSVpuhY7y4syS1Jz8jSUPFJzcvJ1FMrzi3JSFJU0rSHyUGUw5QA) or [GitHub codespaces](https://codespaces.new/chapel-lang/chapel-hello-world). The website now also links to our new [**Chapel Slack Workspace**](https://join.slack.com/t/chapelnetwork/shared_invite/zt-3p459bjlh-0TQRloaBPqkZUe_dWz~C~Q), provided by Slack and HPSF. Come chat with us there, particularly if you prefer Slack to [Discord](https://discord.gg/xu2xg45yqH) or [Gitter](https://gitter.im/chapel-lang/chapel). # HPSFCon Talks This quarter kicked off with a number of Chapel-related sessions at [HPSFCon 2026](https://hpsf.io/event/hpsf-conference-2026/) by Daniel Fedorin, Engin Kayraklioglu, and Jade Abraham, as previewed in our [February newsletter](https://chapel.discourse.group/t/chapel-newsletter-february-2026/47986) and on the [HPSF blog](https://hpsf.io/blog/2026/hpsf-project-communities-to-gather-at-hpsfcon-in-chicago/). Their talks spanned a number of topics, including [**GPU computing**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#artifact-hpsfcon26-gpu), [**language adoption**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#artifact-hpsfcon26-adoption), [**technical debt**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#artifact-hpsfcon26-techdebt), [**user experiences**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#artifact-hpsfcon26-users), [**compiler optimizations**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#artifact-hpsfcon26-compiler), [**tools**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#artifact-hpsfcon26-tools), and the [**Dyno compiler project**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#artifact-hpsfcon26-dyno). In addition, Engin participated in a [**benchmarking panel**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#artifact-hpsfcon26-panel) and Jade gave a [**live demo**](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#artifact-hpsfcon26-demo) of Chapel. Slides and links to the recordings are available on the [Chapel website](https://chapel-lang.org/presentations/#hpsfcon2026), while non-Chapel HPSFCon sessions are available [on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@HPSF-community/playlists). # "My Open Source Experience" Interviews _My Open Source Experience_ is a podcast by Ildikó Váncsa that's published in video format on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@MyOpenSourceExperience) along with audio on [several](https://open.spotify.com/show/4MHNw1NmWcGnCzEX0006F4) [standard](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/my-open-source-experience-podcast/id1726085697) [podcast](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLPMFP41) [platforms](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-my-open-source-experience-126546686/). Its interviews focus 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**](https://youtu.be/ENivDRCFr5w?si=4ZIvnc_DdK23A7mY) - Engin's interview: [**Life-Changing Internship**](https://youtu.be/90tri7_uKys?si=d3URhBD3M1Pc23ML) - a multi-perspective episode, [**Things that Matter for Building Lasting Communities**](https://youtu.be/NdJm0QdddRc?si=84wyPgsCY-mMpOZF), featuring: - Brad on building [**community**](https://youtu.be/QNjzccW_HOA?si=WfwedHvPx2CO19fJ) and [**trust**](https://youtu.be/f44MBVMv1WM?si=6Jp8NjTGOAPMQxSk) - Engin on [**the role of mentoring**](https://youtu.be/R10MZsYxrhc?si=H6KGozM-z_ibM41U) in community-building For convenience, we've collected these long- and short-form clips in a new [**Chapel Interviews playlist**](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuqM5RJ2KYFh4aArrLM59bJhEVrGuq8tc) 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](https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/discussions/categories/weekly-meeting-topics?discussions_q=) are every Tuesday 10AM PT - [Chapel Deep-Dives and Demos](https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/discussions/27247) 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](https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel/discussions/27247)! ### Chapel Resources - [Website](https://chapel-lang.org/) - [Blog](https://chapel-lang.org/blog/) - [Community Forums](https://chapel-lang.org/forums/) - [Get Involved](https://chapel-lang.org/getinvolved/) - [Newsletters](https://chapel.discourse.group/c/newsletters/) - [Social Media Intake Form](https://forms.gle/HFecAmZukJSUdzH78) ### Follow Chapel on Social Media - [Bluesky](https://web-cdn.bsky.app/profile/chapellanguage.bsky.social) - [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/ChapelLanguage) - [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/ChapelLanguage) - [Mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@chapelprogramminglanguage) - [X](https://x.com/ChapelLanguage) - [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@ChapelLanguage)