Chapel 1.8.0 released

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.

This release of Chapel contains stable support for the base language, and for task and regular data parallelism using one or more locales. Data parallel operations on irregular domains and arrays are currently supported in a single-locale implementation. While performance has received a great deal of attention in Chapel's design, this release lacks a number of crucial performance optimizations and is not suitable for in-depth performance comparisons and studies.