Instructor: Alex Razoumov (WestGrid)

Title: Parallel programming in Chapel

This course is a general introduction to the main concepts of the Chapel parallel programming language. Chapel is a relatively new language for both shared- and distributed-memory programming, with easy-to-use, high-level abstractions for both task and data parallelism that make it ideal for learning parallel programming for a novice HPC user.

Chapel is incredibly intuitive, striving to merge the ease-of-use of Python and the performance of traditional compiled languages such as C and Fortran. Parallel constructs that typically take tens of lines of MPI code can be expressed in only a few lines of Chapel code. Chapel is open source and can run on any Unix-like operating system, with hardware support from laptops to large HPC systems.

Target audience: general

Course plan:

• introduction to Chapel basic language features
• task parallelism (mostly on single node)
• data parallelism (both on single and across multiple nodes)

Duration: 6 hours

Level: beginner

Prerequisites: None

Setup:

• Cluster reservation: 4 nodes * 3 cores/node per attendee
• Laptop software: SSH client (built-in on Mac/Linux, on Windows MobaXTerm or PuTTY)