Abstract
The multicore generation of scientific high performance computing has provided a platform for the realization of Exascale computing, and has also underscored the need for new paradigms in coding parallel applications. The current standard for writing parallel applications requires programmers to use languages designed for sequential execution. These languages have abstractions that only allow programmers to operate on the process centric local view of data. To provide suitable languages for parallel execution, many research efforts have designed languages based on the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming model. Chapel is one of the more recent languages to be developed using this model. Chapel supports multithreaded execution with high-level abstractions for parallelism. With Chapel in mind, we have developed a set of directives that serve as intermediate expressions for transitioning scientific applications from languages designed for sequential execution to PGAS languages like Chapel that are being developed with parallelism in mind.
