CHIUW 2016 Keynote

This talk aims to present my personal experiences using Chapel in my research. My research interests are in observational cosmology; more specifically, I use large surveys of galaxies to constrain the evolution of the Universe and to probe the physics underlying that evolution. Operationally, this involves measuring a number of spatial statistics of the distribution of galaxies, both on actual observations, but also on large numbers of simulated universes. I'll start by presenting a whirlwind introduction to cosmology, the problems that keep me up at night and our approaches to solving these. I'll then discuss what attracted me to Chapel-the ability to prototype algorithms quickly and the promised ease and flexibility of writing parallel programs. I'll then present a worked example of Chapel being used in a real-world application, discussing some of these aspects as well highlighting its interoperability with existing libraries, as well as some of the challenges. I'll conclude with what it would take for me to switch over to using Chapel all of the time.