In the Parallel Compiler Runtime Consortium (PCRC) project, we have
developed a library (Adlib) to support translation of HPF-like
data-parallel languages.  The library incorporates a compact descriptor
for arbitrary HPF-compliant distributed arrays and a comprehensive
library of collective communications and computations that can be used
for efficient translation of data parallel languages.

The library has been successfully exploited by experimental HPF
compilers, but we note that the take-up of HPF by practising scientists
has been relatively slow.  The seminar will overview the PCRC
libraries, then discuss a novel class of languages for data-parallel
programming---similar to HPF, but rooted in a lower-level,
explicitly SPMD programming style, with explicit calls to appropriate
libraries for communication.  We suggest that, in the short term at
least, these more conservative language extensions may provide an
attractive alternative to HPF.  C++, Fortran and Java (``HPJava'')
bindings of the language model will be discussed.