Abstract: This report describes Nesl, a strongly-typed, applicative, data-parallel language. Nesl is intended to be used as a portable interface for programming a variety of parallel and vector supercomputers, and as a basis for teaching parallel algorithms. Parallelism is supplied through a simple set of data-parallel constructs based on sequences (ordered sets), including a mechanism for applying any function over the elements of a sequence in parallel and a rich set of parallel functions that manipulate sequences.
Nesl fully supports nested sequences and nested parallelism---the ability to take a parallel function and apply it over multiple instances in parallel. Nested parallelism is important for implementing algorithms with complex and dynamically changing data structures, such as required in many graph and sparse matrix algorithms. Nesl also provides a mechanism for calculating the asymptotic running time for a program on various parallel machine models, including the parallel random access machine (PRAM). This is useful for estimating running times of algorithms on actual machines and, when teaching algorithms, for supplying a close correspondence between the code and the theoretical complexity.
This report defines Nesl and describes several examples of algorithms coded in the language. The examples include algorithms for median finding, sorting, string searching, finding prime numbers, and finding a planar convex hull. Nesl currently compiles to an intermediate language called Vcode, which runs on the Cray Y-MP, Connection Machine CM-2, and Encore Multimax. For many algorithms, the current implementation gives performance close to optimized machine-specific code for these machines.
Note: This report is an updated version of CMU-CS-92-103, which described version 2.4 of the language. The most significant changes in version 2.6 are that it supports polymorphic types, has an ML-like syntax instead of a lisp-like syntax, and includes support for I/O.
@techreport{nesl,
author = "Guy~E. Blelloch",
title = "{NESL}: A Nested Data-Parallel Language (Version 2.6)",
institution = "School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University",
number = "CMU-CS-93-129",
month = apr,
year = 1993 }