Abstract
This paper will demonstrate how the parallelism and expressiveness of the Chapel programming language are used to achieve an enormous improvement in computational speed for a problem related to coral reef conservation. Chapel’s concise syntax and versatile data structures enable this problem to be solved in under 300 lines of code, while reducing the time to solution from days down to the order of seconds. This improvement is so substantial that it represents a paradigm shift in the way biodiversity can be measured at scale, providing a wealth of novel information for marine ecosystem managers and opening up brand new avenues for scientific inquiry. This paper will review the solution strategy and data structures in Chapel that allowed these improvements to be realized, and will preview future extensions of this work that have been made possible by this drastic speedup.