What's New?

ZPL is a product and a research project, so changes are constantly being made to the web pages and the compiler, though not necessarily at the same time. We'll try to keep you up-to-date by highlighting major changes on this page.

22 April 2004

ZPL Version 2.0.0 is released under an OSI-approved open-source licence. Substantial changes have been made since the last binary release. See this page for details on language changes. Additionally, stability has improved and a number of major internal improvements have been implemented:

• Increased Portability ZPL has been ported to
  • CYGWIN on Windows (ZPLTARGET=x86-cygwin)
  • Mac OS X (ZPLTARGET=powerpc-macosx)
  • The CRAY X1 (ZPLTARGET=x1)
• Improved Performance. This release includes optimizations of
  • sum-of-product stencils, e.g., 9-point stencils, (Subexpressions are cached between adjacent applications of the stencil.)
  • the remap operator, formerly gather/scatter
  • sparse regions (Iteration and representation have been improved.)
  In addition, generated code now uses the "restrict" keyword to improve scalar performance.
• MPI-Specific
  • The ZPLCOMMLAYER mpi, mpi-lam, and mpi-mpich values have been converged into a single value (mpi) with a ZPLMPITYPE companion environment variable that should be set to lam or mpich when using those implementations and unset otherwise (e.g., when using a vendor-supplied implementation of MPI).
  • Support has been added for spawning a "print task" to MPI runs to ensure that writing to the console shows up in the proper order. If your output looks correct, there's no need to use it. Otherwise, run with the -mpi_print_task flag, which will spawn p+1 processes and all printing will be routed through the extra task.

A page showing performance results on a 1024-node cluster, a 176-processor IBM SP, and a 256-processor Cray T3E is added. These performance results were previously published in a paper that appeared in PPoPP '03: Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming.

A much-anticipated major overhaul to the ZPL web site is made.

 

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24 August 2000

ZPL Version 1.16.59 is released. This is the last public "binary-only" release of ZPL.

 

4 July 1997

ZPL Version 1.11.0 is released. This is the first public release of the ZPL.