Chapel / News: Recent posts

Please note that the Chapel source code and releases are now hosted at GitHub:

https://github.com/chapel-lang/chapel

Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.14.0 of the Chapel Compiler. Please see the CHANGES.md file for release highlights and notes. Full instructions for downloading and installing Chapel are on the Chapel website. Download the source release, chapel-1.14.0.tar.gz, to get started.

Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.13.1 of the Chapel Compiler.

Chapel 1.13.1 is a minor release containing bug fixes to 1.13.0, the most significant of which was a race condition that was introduced in reductions between 1.12.0 and 1.13.0 but not caught until after 1.13.0 was released.

The highlights of version 1.13.0 include:

Dramatic improvements to string performance, memory leaks, and standard library routines.... read more

Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.13.0 of the Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include:

Dramatic improvements to string performance, memory leaks, and standard library routines.

Language feature improvements, including: an expanded 'use' statement supporting filtering, renaming, and enumerated types; support for min/max reduce intents, and for reduce intents to be applied to coforall loops; and the ability to create subclasses of generic classes.... read more

Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.12.0 of the Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include:

We significantly expanded the coverage and scope of Chapel's online documentation, available at: http://chapel.cray.com/docs/1.12/

The standard library now includes new 'Barrier', 'LAPACK', and 'Spawn' modules for performing inter-task barrier synchronization, linear algebra, and multi-process spawning, respectively.... read more

Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.11.0 of the Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include:

The 'chpldoc' source-code-to-documentation tool has been revamped to support better web output and includes a richer feature set. Documentation for all standard library modules, created using 'chpldoc', is now available online at:

http://chapel.cray.com/docs/latest/... read more

Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are pleased to announce the
release of version 1.10.0 of the Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include:

The runtime tasking layer has switched to the lighter-weight Qthreads-based
implementation by default, resulting in performance improvements for most
computations. This release also includes initial support for Intel Xeon Phi
Knights Corner (KNC) processors using the 'fifo' tasking layer.... read more

Cray Inc. and the Chapel open-source community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.9.0 of Chapel.

The highlights of this release include: improved operator precedence for bitwise operators, '..', and 'in'; the ability for users to overload assignment operators; intrinsic atomic variable support for Cray and Intel compilers; significant performance improvements and reductions in compiler-introduced memory leaks; several new versions of the Computer Language Benchmark Games in the examples/ directory; an improved default nested parallelism policy w.r.t. the dataParIgnoreRunningTasks flag; significant improvements to the LLVM back-end; improved symmetry of program startup and execution across the locales a program is running on; ; a new 'make check' rule to the top-level Makefile that can be used to validate a build; significant improvements to the testing system, particularly for performance testing; and numerous bug fixes. See $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES in the release for a more complete list.... read more

Cray Inc. and the Chapel developer community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.8.0 of Chapel.

The highlights of this release include: initial support for user-defined locale models and a prototype NUMA locale model; support for accessing HDFS file systems via Chapel's files and channels; improved tasking semantics with respect to references to variables from lexical scopes outside of the task's; new example codes for Mantevo MiniMD and the Computer Language Benchmark Game; performance optimizations related to array base pointers and loop-invariant code motion; a reduction in the number of compiler-generated memory leaks; new types to simplify interoperating with C; improved support for small-int computations, ranges, domains, and arrays; dygraph-based performance monitoring in the testing system; numerous bug fixes; and improvements to semantic checks and error messages. See $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES in the release for a more complete list.... read more

Cray Inc. and the Chapel developer community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.7.0 of Chapel.

The highlights of this release include: support for formatted I/O via readf()/writef() routines; support for associative domain and array literals; support for regular expression operations on strings and channels; support for injecting C declarations into Chapel via 'extern blocks'; a capability for main() to take arguments and return a status value; support for iteration over homogenous tuples; performance improvements related to stack allocating and remote-value-forwarding constant variables; significant improvements to the Chapel version of LULESH; numerous bug fixes; and improvements to semantic checks and error messages. See $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES in the release for a more complete list.... read more

Cray Inc. and the Chapel developer community are pleased to announce the release of version 1.6.0 of Chapel.

The highlights of this release include: support for array literals; syntactic improvements to domain literals and zippered iteration; improved support for 'atomic' variables including support for floating point atomics and new methods on all atomic variables; support for pass-by-reference argument intents; a new 'chpldoc' capability for creating documentation from source-based comments; support for using LLVM as a back-end compiler target; support for user overloads of 'op=' and '<=>' assignment operators; support for a strided bulk communication optimization; significant improvements to the SSCA2, RA, and LULESH example codes; and numerous performance improvements and bug fixes. See $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES in the release for a more complete list.... read more

It recently came to our attention that our 1.4.0 release was packaged in a way that caused problems when unpacking the tarball on certain platforms, such as newer Macs. This afternoon we refreshed the release download with a copy that should fix the issue. We apologize for any frustration or inconvenience that users may have experienced. Thanks to those who brought the issue to our attention and sorry not to have caught it earlier.

As part of the run-up to SC11, the Chapel project has released a technology preview release to demonstrate a new QIO (Quick I/O) capability that will be released with Chapel 1.5. QIO is developed by Michael Ferguson from the Laboratory for Telecommunications Sciences and is designed to replace Chapel's initial I/O capabilities with something more industrial-strength. This QIO preview release is available for download from the folder below. Please review the README file in that directory before using.... read more

Cray Inc. is pleased to announce the release of version 1.4.0 of the
Cray Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include: New optimizations for
whole-array assignments and remote array accesses; new 'export' and
'extern' keywords for interoperability; improved support for Qthreads
and Nanos+++ tasking, including multi-locale execution; dynamic work
partitioning iterators for ranges; new and improved example codes;
improvements to the language specification; and numerous feature
improvements and bug fixes. See $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES for a more
complete list of changes.... read more

Cray Inc. is pleased to announce the release of version 1.3.0 of the Cray Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include: Initial support for a Replicated distribution and improved support for the Block-Cyclic distribution; a major reworking of the semantics and implementation of ranges; initial support for volatile bool, int, uint, real, and imag types; support for extern consts and classes; extensive improvements to the sample codes in $CHPL_HOME/examples; significant updates to the language specification; as well as numerous feature improvements and bug fixes. See $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES for a more complete list of changes.... read more

Cray Inc. is pleased to announce the release of version 1.2.0 of the Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include: support for parallel iteration over sparse and associative domains and arrays; support for config types and more general config param expressions; initial support for first-class and anonymous functions; expanded support for declaring external C functions, types, and variables; support for the Cray XE6 (TM) and the Cray CX1000 (TM); improvements to the language specification and documentation; and a number of bug fixes.... read more

Cray Inc. is pleased to announce the release of version 1.1 of the Chapel Compiler.

The highlights of this release include: parallel execution of all data parallel operations on arithmetic domains and arrays; improved control over the degree and granularity of parallelism for data parallel language constructs; feature-complete Block and Cyclic distributions; simplified constructor calls for Block and Cyclic distributions; support for assignments between, and removal of indices from sparse domains; more robust performance optimizations on aligned arithmetic domains and arrays; many programmability and correctness improvements; new example programs demonstrating task parallel concepts and distributions; wide-ranging improvements to the content and organization of the language specification.... read more

Cray is pleased to announce the 1.02 Cray Chapel Compiler release.

This release is an update to the 1.0 and 1.01 releases that includes
performance and scalability enhancements. The 1.02 release is
also the version that we are using to obtain our final HPC Challenge
performance numbers for this year's challenge at SC09. For a full list of
changes in the release, please refer to $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES after
installing Chapel.... read more

Cray is pleased to announce the 1.01 Cray Chapel Compiler release.

This release is an update to the 1.0 release that adds support for
loosely-coupled heterogeneous computation via a new concept known as
the 'realm'. See $CHPL_HOME/doc/technotes/README.multirealm for more
information or $CHPL_HOME/examples/tutorials/multirealm.chpl for an
example. This release also contains performance and scalability
improvements to the 1.0 release, particularly for Block distributions.
For a full list of changes in the release, please refer to
$CHPL_HOME/CHANGES after loading the chapel module.... read more

Cray is pleased to announce the 1.0 Cray Chapel Compiler release.

The highlights of this release include: data parallelism for
operations on ranges, local domains, and local arrays; increased
stability and completeness of the Block distribution; improved memory
utilization in the generated executable; support for PrgEnv-cray as a
back-end C compiler; improvements to the PBS launcher; general
performance and correctness improvements; and the inclusion of editor
modes for emacs and vim. For a full list of changes in the release,
please refer to $CHPL_HOME/CHANGES after loading the chapel module.... read more

Cray is pleased to announce the Cray Chapel Compiler release v0.9.
Chapel is a new parallel programming language designed to improve
productivity of high-end computer users while also serving as a
portable parallel programming model for use on commodity clusters or
desktop multi-core system. Chapel's implementation is very much a
work-in-progress and is being made available to get feedback from
potential users in order to improve Chapel's usefulness, generality,
and adoptability.... read more