ljdursi / chiuw2017

Keynote talk for CHIUW2017

Chapel's Home in the Landscape of New Scientific Computing Languages

(and what it can learn from the neighbours)

This is the presentation and associated materials for my talk at The 4th Chapel Implementers and Users Workshop. The slides can be viewed directly at https://ljdursi.github.io/CHIUW2017/ .

Abstract

The last decade has seen an explosion of interest and diversity in large-scale computing. Many scientists are interested in seizing the opportunities these emerging new platforms, compiler frameworks, and languages provide, aiming for bigger simulations, more data, or higher levels of computational productivity in their research than had been feasible before. But with the landscape so quickly changing and so many new tools becoming available, it is hard to know where to focus attention. How is a researcher to choose a language to start a new project in when new possibilities appear so often? There are new languages for scientific computing like Julia, which has linear algebra built in but only modest parallel computing support. There are frameworks like Spark, which is parallel and cluster-enabled from the beginning, but targeted for data analysis rather than simulation. There are old stalwarts like R which grow tendrils into tools like Spark or SCALAPACK; and even new non-number crunching languages like Rust and Swift are starting to have scientific computing adherents.

Chapel is a language from Cray that has fields over domains as first-class entities, allowing for efficient and productive parallel domain-decomposed computations. Where does Chapel fit in amongst these new languages; when should a researcher use Chapel, when should they use one of the others, and what ideas and techniques are out there that could Chapel usefully adopt? It's these questions I address in this talk.

I give a brief overview of some of these other platforms and languages that are being adopted for different types of scientific computing, and compare them to Chapel in the context of two quite different types of scientific problems - high speed fluid flow, and genomic bioinformatics. I discuss pros and cons, when to use each, and look at what ideas could be poached by Chapel and its community.