ZPL (short for ''Z-level Programming Language'') is an
array programming language designed to replace C and C++ programming languages in engineering and scientific applications.
Because its design goal was to obtain
cross-platform
In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...
high performance, ZPL programs run fast on both
sequential and
parallel computers. Highly-parallel ZPL programs are simple and easy to write because it exclusively uses
implicit parallelism In computer science, implicit parallelism is a characteristic of a programming language that allows a compiler or interpreter to automatically exploit the parallelism inherent to the computations expressed by some of the language's constructs. ...
.
Originally called Orca C, ZPL was designed and implemented during 1993–1995 by the Orca Project of the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the
University of Washington
The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington.
Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seatt ...
.
Details
ZPL uses the array abstraction to implement a
data parallel
Data parallelism is parallelization across multiple processors in parallel computing environments. It focuses on distributing the data across different nodes, which operate on the data in parallel. It can be applied on regular data structures lik ...
programming model. This is the reason why ZPL achieves such good performance: having no
parallel directives or other forms of explicit parallelism, ZPL exploits the operational trait that when aggregate computations are described in terms of arrays, many scalar operations must be (implicitly) performed to implement the array operations. This ''implied'' computation can be automatically allotted to different processors to achieve concurrency: Parallelism arises from the semantics of the array operations.
ZPL is translated into a conventional
abstract syntax tree representation on which
program analysis and
program optimizations are performed.
ANSI C code is generated as the object code. This C program (which is machine independent because it implements certain operations in abstract form) is then compiled using the native C compiler on the
target machine with custom libraries optimized to the specific platform.
The creators of ZPL were: Brad Chamberlain, Sung-Eun Choi, E Christopher Lewis, Calvin Lin, Jason Secosky, Larry Snyder, and W. Derrick Weathersby with assistance from Ruth Anderson, A.J. Bernheim, Marios Dikaiakos, George Forman, and Kurt Partridge.
ZPL's status as an active project is in question; the latest "What's new" item on the front page of the official website is dated 9 January 2005.
See also
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Array programming
In computer science, array programming refers to solutions which allow the application of operations to an entire set of values at once. Such solutions are commonly used in scientific and engineering settings.
Modern programming languages that ...
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J
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K
*
Partitioned global address space
References
External links
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{{Authority control
Array programming languages
Concurrent programming languages
Programming languages created in 1993