NESL

language A parallel language loosely based on ML,

developed at Carnegie Mellon University by the SCandAL

project. NESL integrates parallel algorithms, functionallanguages and implementation techniques from the system's

community.

Nested data parallelism offers concise code that is easy to

understand and debug and suits irregular data structures such

as trees, graphs or sparse matrices.

NESL's language based performance model is a formal way to

calculate the "work" and "depth" of a program. These measures

can be related to running time on a parallel computer.

NESL was designed to make parallel programming easy and

portable. Algorithms are typically more concise in NESL than

in most other parallel programming languages and the code

resembles high-level pseudocode. This places more

responsibility on the compiler and run-time system for

achieving good efficiency.

NESL currently runs on Unix workstations, the IBM SP-2,

the Thinking Machines CM5, the Cray C90 and J90, the

MasPar MP2, and the Intel Paragon. Work is underway

(April 1997) on a portable MPI back end, and an

implementation for symmetric multiprocessors, such as the

SGI Power Challenge or the DEC AlphaServer.

Latest version: Release 3.1, as of 1995-11-01.

Home.

["NESL: A Nested Data-Parallel Language", Guy Blelloch,

CMU-CS-93-129, April 1993].

(1997-04-13)