array distribution type

[ViralBShah]

I feel that we really should have array distribution as a type, on which we dispatch. That way, instead of dones, we would be able to do ones(RowDist, eltype, m, n) for example. Having distribution types will also allow us to cleanly support different layouts.

[jakebolewski]

I like the design of Chapel's domain maps. We have a greater ability to experiment here as user defined domain maps are difficult to implement in Chapel. I feel it will take a lot of experimentation to come up with a design that works well and generalizes beyond dense arrays.

[ViralBShah]

Yeah - that would be quite cool. My Star-P experience suggested that having support for a few dense distributions and one sparse distribution took us a long way. The GlobalArrays is another framework to look at.

http://hpc.pnl.gov/globalarrays/