ZPL is an array programming language (like APL, J, and Glee) designed from first principles for fast execution on both sequential and parallel computers. It provides a convenient high-level programming medium for supercomputers and large-scale clusters with efficiency comparable to hand-coded message passing. It is the perfect alternative to using a sequential language like C or Fortran and a message passing library like MPI. It is based around a matrix, and it compiles to ANSI C.