Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing 21(1):4-14, April 1994.
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. 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, 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 code for regular dense data, and is often superior for irregular data.
@article{ blelloch94implementation,
author = "Guy E. Blelloch and Jonathan C. Hardwick and Jay Sipelstein and Marco Zagha and Siddhartha Chatterjee",
title = "Implementation of a Portable Nested Data-Parallel Language",
journal = "Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing",
volume = "21",
number = "1",
pages = "4--14",
year = "1994",
url = "citeseer.nj.nec.com/blelloch94implementation.html" }