About Chapel
Since its first public release in 2009, Chapel has grown from an intriguing research prototype to a revolutionary, highly-productive language that allows users to easily leverage the abundant parallelism made available by the CPUs, GPUs, and compute nodes of modern computer systems. From laptops to supercomputers, Chapel’s global namespace and parallel features support clean, performant, and optimizable computations. User applications written in Chapel span diverse computations and fields, including Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), Earth Sciences, Quantum Physics, Graph Analytics, Image Analysis, and Artificial Intelligence. Thanks to Chapel, these applications have scaled to over a thousand GPUs, thousands of compute nodes, and over a million processor cores. For additional background on Chapel, please see its website and blog.
Thanks to the community’s investment in Chapel, our project has accomplished several key milestones over the past five years, including the addition of vendor-neutral GPU support, our feature-stabilizing Chapel 2.0 release, and the recent transfer of Chapel’s stewardship from HPE/Cray to the open-source community via the Linux Foundation’s High Performance Software Foundation (HPSF). In addition, due to an increased focus on blogging, talks and demos, social media, and open governance, we’ve seen a significant uptick in new users, contributors, packages, and interest in recent years.
“As we enter 2026, the project’s future has become less certain. At present, we are anticipating a transition to a maintenance-only mode this fall, barring new sources of funding or resources.
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A Call to Action
Building upon the foundation we’ve created, there are many opportunities to further improve Chapel going forward, such as continuing to transform our compiler from its research roots to production-quality via our Dyno initiative, improving the tools and ecosystem used to write and debug Chapel programs, addressing users’ feature requests and bug reports, and continuing to expand awareness of Chapel and grow its community.
As we enter 2026, the project’s future has become less certain. At present, we are anticipating a transition to a maintenance-only mode this fall, barring new sources of funding or resources. To that end, we are reaching out to the community with this call, in hopes of identifying potential new sources of funding, developers, or other creative ways to help sustain the project and improve the technology over time.
For context, today the project is primarily driven by several full-time engineers at HPE. We would be delighted to find others in the community who are interested in investing funds and/or personnel toward doing Chapel work beyond maintenance, such as developing new features, optimizations, or portability to new architectures. Our team’s expertise could also be utilized to develop new parallel applications in Chapel. Supporting the project could involve funding some or all of the current team, contributing developer resources from your organization, or some other model we haven’t considered. We envision that any new funding would prioritize efforts of interest to the provider with a portion being used to continue maintaining the base. That said, above all, we are interested in hearing and understanding what would be of most interest and value to you.
In considering this call, if it would be useful to talk with members of the Chapel project to learn more about our technology, or to explore possibilities, please don’t hesitate to reach out via email, LinkedIn, or one of our other community forums.
— Chapel’s Technical Steering Committee Brad Chamberlain, chair Jade Abraham Lydia Duncan Daniel Fedorin Abhishek Girish Ben Harshbarger John Hartman Engin Kayraklioglu Shreyas Khandekar Anna Rift Elliot Ronaghan Andy Stone Karlon West
