Implementation of a portable nested data-parallel language
PPOPP '93 Proceedings of the fourth ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming
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This paper gives an overview of the implementation of NESL, a portable nested data-parallel language. This language and its implementation are the first to fully support nested data structures as well as nested data-parallel function calls. These features allow the concise description of parallel algorithms on irregular data structures, such as sparse matrices and graphs. In addition, they maintain the advantages of data-parallel languages: a simple programming model and portability. The current NESL implementation is based on an intermediate language called VCODE and a library of vector routines called CVL. It runs on the Connection Machines CM-2 and CM-5, the Cray C90, and serial workstations. We compare initial benchmark results of NESL with those of machine-specific code on these machines for three algorithms: least-squares line-fitting, median finding, and a sparse-matrix vector product. These results show that NESL''s performance is competitive with that of machine-specific code for regular dense data, and is often superior for irregular data.