Comparative Performance and Optimization of Chapel in Modern Manycore Architectures

Chapel is an emerging scalable, productive parallel programming language. In this work, we analyze Chapel's performance using The Parallel Research Kernels on two different manycore architectures including a state-of-the-art Intel Knights Landing processor. We discuss implementation techniques in Chapel and their relation to the OpenMP implementations of the PRK. We also suggest and prototype several optimizations in different layers of the software stack including the Chapel compiler. In our experiments we observed that base performance of Chapel ranges from 41%-184% that of OpenMP. The optimization techniques we discussed shows performance improvements ranging from 1.4x to 2x in Chapel.