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I'm an HPC developer, my workstation is a 122 PetaFLOP machine. I go to the Rust language website, and I am able to understand in 1 minute what's the language
by fluffything 7y ago
I'm an HPC developer, my workstation is a 122 PetaFLOP machine.
I go to the Rust language website, and I am able to understand in 1 minute what's the language for, and what value it adds with respect to the alternatives.
I look the Chapel website, and I get nothing. So I have to guess, and my guess is that's a framework developed by one research group to publish research about parallel computing, but that almost nobody uses for anything real in practice - except for the one or two simulation tools that they managed to lock-in 10 years ago. It's not clear to me which value these adds w.r.t the alternatives, like pure MPI+OpenMP, HPX, Fortran co-arrays, and the other dozens or hundreds of half dead research projects that were supposed to "revolutionize" HPC over the last 4 decades. The sad part is that I'm probably right.
The 3 most used languages in "classical" HPC are C, C++ and Fortran. Python was barely used, but now the recent trend of building "AI" HPC national centers have put it in 4th place. The three most used parallel programming paradigms used are MPI (which a dozen of implementations available and in active development), OpenMP, and CUDA. The amount of people that use OpenCL in classical HPC is insignificant. There are more widely-used codes using OpenACC than Intel Thread Building blocks. The users of modern frameworks like HPX is almost non-existent, and the users of things like Chapel are a signed zero. I've access to a handful of >10 Petaflop systems, and none of them have Chapel even available through their module system.
This doesn't say anything at all over whether Chapel is actually good or bad. But it is actually the job of those getting public funding payed by taxpayer dollars to advertise why we should keep funding them and not fund something else. The fact that their website doesn't even try to pitch it suggest me that the only purpose of the project is for the group that develops it to explore interesting ideas and publish papers, as I mentioned above. That's definitely something worth doing, and often decades later these ideas percolate into solutions that people actually use. But simulation frameworks that run on the Top 10 supercomputers usually take hundreds of people and multiple decades to write, and aren't something that follow trendy research frameworks.
- eismcc 7y agoYou are generally right. I’ve been to two chapel conferences. Brad is great, but he’s an engineer. IMO, They have always lacked a good design and marketing support to get the messaging right. Julia blew past them simply due to being more end-user focused.