Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, May 1993.
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.
@inproceedings{ blelloch93implementation,
author = "Guy~E. Blelloch and Siddhartha Chatterjee and Jonathan~C. Hardwick and Jay Sipelstein and Marco Zagha",
title = "Implementation of a Portable Nested Data-Parallel Language",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 4th {ACM} {SIGPLAN} Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming",
pages = "102--111",
month = "May",
year = "1993"
}