Designed and developed by James McGraw, at the University of Manchester, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Colorado State University, and Digital Equipment Corporation, SISAL was defined in 1983, and the first implementation was released in 1986.
Named for Streams and Iteration in a Single Assignment Language, SISAL is a functional parallel programming language that combines modern language features with readable syntax and sound semantic foundations.
It was most strongly influenced by VAL, although it also had some influences from C, Fortran, and Pascal. To VAL, it adds recursion and finite streams. SISAL is a dataflow and fine-grain language that serves also as a set of tools that convert textual human-readable dataflow language into a graph format.
Versions existed for the Cray X-MP, Y-MP, and 2, as well as for Sequent, Encore Alliant, DEC-VAX 11/784, dataflow architectures, Transputers, and systolic arrays.
The language enjoyed a resurgence in 2010 when a group from Worcester Polytechnic Institute began a project to implement a fine-grain parallelism backend for the SISAL language. In 2018, a revision to the language added indent-based syntax, first-class functions, lambdas, closure, and lazy semantics. This version is known as SISAL-IS.
The focus of this guide is on the SISAL programming language, and any implementations or versions. IDEs, editors, or other tools created to facilitate programming with the language are also appropriate here, as are SISAL user groups, forums, tutorials, or guides.
Recommended Resources
A Tutorial Introduction to Sisal
Created by the Sisal Language Project, the tutorial may be viewed through the web browser. It includes an introduction to the SISAL programming language, offers an overview of parallel programming, and offers examples and instruction in various coding elements. Exercises are included, along with sections on compiling and running SISAL programs, advanced features, and where to obtain the language files.
http://pascal.eng.uci.edu/projects/sisal/sisaltutorial/Tutorial.html
SourceForge: SISAL Parallel Programming
SISAL is a parallel programming language that supports a clean, fully implicit parallelization model. Its optimizing compiler - sisalc - works on top of pthreads to provide high performance on SMP architectures. A Unix-type implementation is available as a free download. Reviews and ratings are posted to the site, and bug reports, patches and support requests may be made. A support forum is also available.
http://sisal.sourceforge.net/
Hosted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the University of California, the Sisal Language Project offers a tutorial introduction to Sisal, a high-performance, portable, parallel programming language. The tutorial may be viewed in its entirety online or downloaded. It includes an introduction to the language, and to parallel programming, then offers several chapters of programming instruction, including basic and advanced features.
http://www2.cmp.uea.ac.uk/~jrwg/Sisal/
