Computing Hypergraph Homology in Chapel

In this paper, we discuss our experience in implementing homology computation, in particular the Betti number calculations in Chapel hypergraph Library (CHGL). Given a dataset represented as a hypergraph, a Betti number for a particular dimension k indicates how many k-dimensional ‘voids’ are present in the dataset. Computing the Betti numbers involve various array-centric and linear algebra operations. We demonstrate that implementing these operations in Chapel is both concise and intuitive. In addition, we show that Chapel provides language constructs for implementing parallel and distributed execution of the linear algebra kernels with minimal effort. Syntactically, Chapel provides succinctness of Python, while delivering comparable and better performance than C++-based and Julia-based packages for calculating the Betti numbers respectively.