Nesl Programming Language
A Parallel Programming Language
It integrates various ideas from
- the theory community -- parallel algorithms
- the languages community --functional languages
- the system's community -- many of the implementation techniques
- Nested data parallelism -- this feature offers the benefits of data parallelism, concise code that is easy to understand and debug, while being well suited for irregular algorithms, such as algorithms on trees, graphs or sparse matrices (see the examples above or in our library of algorithms).
- A language based performance model -- this gives a formal way to calculated the work and depth of a program. These measures can be related to running time on parallel machines
The main emphasis in the design of NESL was to make parallel programming easy and portable
Algorithms are typically significantly more concise in NESL than in most other parallel programming languages. Furthermore the code closely resembles high-level pseudocode
-- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scandal/nesl.html
Programming Parallel Algorithms . Describes and motivates the two main ideas behind NESL, nested data parallelism and the language based performance model It appears in CACM199603
Implementation of a Portable Nested Data-Parallel Language
Outlines the current implementation of NESL and gives some performance numbers on a variety of parallel machines. It appears in JPDC199411
NESL: A Nested Data-Parallel Language
The language definition, including a complete list of functions. It does not contain the operational semantics
NESL User's Manual
Describes how to set up the NESL environment and how to use the various features in NESL (such as tracing, profiling and using remote machines)
A Provable Time and Space Efficient Implementation of NESL
Includes the operational semantics of NESL and a proof that the work and depth bounds can be mapped into running time on various machine models.
NESL release 3.1 (November, 1995)
Nesl 3.1 is available in the file
Once copied over to your machine, it can be unpacked by running:
gunzip -c nesl.tar.gz | tar -xf -
This will create a subdirectory nesl in the current directory with this structure:
The files in these directories are also available individually.
BUILD Directions on how to build NESL
COPYRIGHT Copyright information
Makefile Used for building the release
README This file
bin/
runnesl The NESL executable
vinterp.* The VCODE interpreter, for various architectures
xneslplot X11 interface used for NESL graphics
foreground.* Scripts for executing VCODE from NESL in the foreground
background.* Scripts for executing VCODE from NESL in the foreground
cvl/
cm2/ Source code for the CM-2 version of CVL
cm5/ Source code for the CM-5 version of CVL
cray/ Source code for the CRAY version of CVL
mpi/ Source code for the MPI version of CVL
serial/ Source code for the serial version of CVL
doc/
cvl.ps The CVL manual
manual.ps The NESL manual
user.ps The NESL user's guide
vcode-ref.ps The VCODE manual
emacs/ NESL editing mode for GNU Emacs
examples/ Collection of NESL examples
include/ cvl.h include file
lib/
libcvl.a The CVL library
neslseqsrc/ Source code for stand-alone NESL
neslsrc/ Source code for NESL
release.notes List of changes since the last release
utils/ Source code for xneslplot
vcode/ Source code for the VCODE interpreter