Implementation of a portable nested data-parallel language

Abstract

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, 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 Machine CM-2, the Cray Y-MP C90, and serial machines. 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 codes for regular dense data, and is often superior for irregular data.