StenSAL: A Single Assignment Language for Relentlessly Executing Explicit Stencil Algorithms

Abstract

Many different scientific domains make use of stencil-based algorithms to solve mathematical equations for computational modeling and simulation. Existing imperative languages map well onto physical hardware, but can be difficult for domain scientists to map to mathematical stencil algorithms. StenSAL is a domain specific language which is tailored to the expression of explicit stencil algorithms through deterministic tasks chained together through single assignment data dependencies, and generates programs that map to the relentless execution model of computation. We provide a description of the StenSAL language and grammar, some of the sanity checks that can be performed on StenSAL programs before code generation, and how the compiler translates StenSAL into Python.