Chapel is an emerging parallel programming language whose design and development is being led by Cray Inc. Chapel is being developed as an open-source effort with contributions from academia, industry, and scientific computing centers. Chapel emerged from Cray's entry in the DARPA-led High Productivity Computing Systems program (HPCS).

Chapel is designed to improve the productivity of high-end computer users while also serving as a portable parallel programming model that can be used on commodity clusters or desktop multicore systems. Chapel strives to vastly improve the programmability of large-scale parallel computers while matching or beating the performance and portability of current programming models like MPI.