NESL User's Manual
(For Version 3.1)

Guy E. Blelloch
Jay Sipelstein - Jonathan C. Hardwick
Marco Zagha

September 19, 1995
CMU-CS-95-169

Abstract:

This manual is a supplement to the language definition of NESL version 3.1. It describes how to use the NESL system interactively and covers features for accessing on-line help, debugging, profiling, executing programs on remote machines, using NESL with GNU Emacs, and installing and customizing the NESL system.

This research was sponsored in part by the Wright Laboratory, Aeronautical Systems Center, Air Force Materiel Command, USAF, and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) under grant number F33615-93-1-1330. It was also supported in part by an NSF Young Investigator Award under grant number CCR-9258525, and by Finmeccanica.
The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of Wright Laboratory or the U. S. Government.

Keywords:Parallel programming languages, collection-oriented languages, remote execution, programming environments, supercomputers, nested parallelism

• Contents
• Introduction
  • System requirements
  • Other sources of information
  • Conventions
• Using NESL
  • Starting NESL
  • How NESL evaluates expressions
  • Top-level expressions and commands
  • Errors
    • Running out of memory:
    • Parse errors:
    • Garbage collection:
  • The init file
  • Exiting NESL
  • Variable and Function Redefinition
• Top-level Commands
  • On-line help
  • Loading NESL files
  • Customizing output
  • Monitoring execution
    • Redefining monitored functions:
  • Configurations and remote execution
  • Background execution
  • Checking interpreter status
  • Saving NESL state
• Editor Support
  • Using NESL with GNU Emacs
  • Using NESL with other editors
• Installing NESL
  • Getting the files
  • Structure of NESL distribution
  • Building NESL
    • The C compiler:
    • Making CVL, VCODE and xneslplot separately:
    • Compiling CVL and VCODE for a Connection Machine, Cray, or Maspar:
    • Compiling CVL and VCODE for MPI:
    • Compiling for multiple serial architectures:
    • Compiling for Linux
    • Avoiding dumping NESL:
    • Portable pseudorandom numbers:
    • What can be deleted?:
  • Building Stand-alone NESL
  • Machine configurations
• Bugs
  • Current bugs
  • How to report bugs
• References
• NESL Examples
  • Example code in distribution
  • Sample session
    • Scalar operations
    • Vector operations
    • An example: string searching
• Index
• About this document ...