ZPL: An Array Sublanguage

The notion of isolating the “common case” is a well known computer science principle. This paper describes ZPL, a language that treats data parallelism as a common case of MIMD parallelism. This separation of concerns has many benefits. It allows us to define a clean and concise language for describing data parallel computations, and this in turn leads to efficient parallel execution. Our particular language also provides mechanisms for handling boundary conditions. We introduce the concepts, constructs and semantics of our new language, and give a simple example that contrasts ZPL with other data parallel languages.

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