We’re excited to welcome Chapel to the High Performance Software Foundation!
Chapel is an open source programming language designed for productive parallel computing. It lets developers express parallelism and data locality cleanly, whether they’re running computations on laptops, clusters, clouds, or supercomputers.
Chapel’s scalability and portability have made it a productive choice for computational scientists across fields like aerospace, oceanography, quantum physics, cybersecurity, AI, and more. In practice, user applications written in Chapel have scaled to over a million processor cores, a thousand GPUs, and thousands of compute nodes.
“Open source programming languages like Chapel that support high productivity are essential to dealing with the increasing complexity in HPC and scalable AI workflows in innovative ways. Since Chapel’s inception, it’s been our intention to move the language to a community-governed model to grow the number of contributors and organizations able to steer it,” said Brad Chamberlain, technical lead of the Chapel project and distinguished technologist at HPE. “The High Performance Software Foundation is committed to supporting portable high performance software and lowering barriers to adoption of HPC, which makes it the perfect community to foster collaboration and further innovation for Chapel.”
What’s New in Chapel
A highlight for Chapel was the release of version 2.0 in March 2024, which stabilized the core features of the language and standard libraries. Since that time, the team has turned a large part of its attention to improving tooling, by adding VSCode support, a linter, language server, and better debugging support. They’re also modernizing the original Chapel research compiler for faster compilation times and smarter development.
Most recently, the Chapel community came together for ChapelCon ‘25, featuring four days of talks, tutorials, coding sessions, and office hours. This year’s event saw a record number of submissions and speakers, all of which are archived on the conference website.
What’s Next
Chapel is just getting started at HPSF. Expect new initiatives, improved tooling, further performance and portability improvements, and opportunities to contribute to a growing HPC community.
“The open source community plays a crucial role in advancing and democratizing HPC and AI by making powerful tools and technologies accessible to everyone,” said Andy Warner, senior distinguished technologist and chief systems engineer at HPE. “By fostering Chapel, the foundation will help build, promote, and advance a portable core software stack for the HPCindustry. This stewardship will ensure the ecosystem continues to evolve and meet the growing needs of researchers, developers, and organizations worldwide.”
To Learn More
For a gentle introduction to Chapel, check out this casual conversation with Brad on the ‘Technology Now’ podcast. From there, read about user experiences in the 7 Questions for Chapel Users interview series, or see what’s happening in the community by browsing the latest Chapel newsletters. Or, dive right in by visiting the Chapel website and blog to learn more about Chapel’s features, use cases, performance, scalability, and community. Then, when you’re ready…
Get Involved
We need your help to make Chapel thrive. Whether you’re a language user, developer, researcher, or an organization running HPC workloads, there’s a place for you in the Chapel community. Check out our Get Involved page to see how you can contribute.