The design and development of ZPL

ZPL is an implicitly parallel programming language, which means all instructions to implement and manage the parallelism are inserted by the compiler. It is the first implicitly parallel language to achieve performance portability, that is, consistent high performance across all (MIMD) parallel platforms. ZPL has been designed from first principles, and is founded on the CTA abstract parallel machine. A key enabler of ZPL's performance portability is its What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) performance model. The paper describes the antecedent research on which ZPL was founded, the design principles used to build it incrementally, and the technical basis for its performance portability. Comparisons with other parallel programming approaches are included.