ZPL: An Array Sublanguage

The notion of isolating the \common case" is a well known computer science principle. This paper describes ZPL, a language that treats data parallelism as a common case of MIMD parallelism. This separation of concerns has many bene ts. It allows us to de ne a clean and concise language for describing data parallel computations, and this in turn leads to e cient parallel execution. Our particular language also provides mechanisms for handling boundary conditions. We introduce the concepts, constructs and semantics of our new language, and give a simple example that contrasts ZPL with other data parallel languages.