from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
NESL
<language> A parallel language loosely based on {ML},
developed at {Carnegie Mellon University} by the {SCandAL}
project. NESL integrates parallel {algorithms}, {functional
languages} and implementation techniques from the system's
community.
Nested {data parallelism} offers concise code that is easy to
understand and debug and suits irregular data structures such
as {trees}, {graphs} or {sparse matrices}.
NESL's language based performance model is a formal way to
calculate the "work" and "depth" of a program. These measures
can be related to running time on a {parallel computer}.
NESL was designed to make parallel programming easy and
portable. Algorithms are typically more concise in NESL than
in most other parallel programming languages and the code
resembles high-level {pseudocode}. This places more
responsibility on the {compiler} and {run-time system} for
achieving good efficiency.
NESL currently runs on {Unix} {workstations}, the {IBM SP-2},
the {Thinking Machines} {CM5}, the {Cray} {C90} and {J90}, the
{MasPar} {MP2}, and the {Intel} {Paragon}. Work is underway
(April 1997) on a portable {MPI} {back end}, and an
implementation for {symmetric multiprocessors}, such as the
{SGI} {Power Challenge} or the {DEC} {AlphaServer}.
Latest version: Release 3.1, as of 1995-11-01.
Home
(http://cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/scandal/public/www/nesl.html).
["NESL: A Nested Data-Parallel Language", Guy Blelloch,
CMU-CS-93-129, April 1993].
(1997-04-13)