Berkeley UPC - Unified Parallel C

(A joint project of LBNL and UC Berkeley)

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Berkeley UPC downloads

November 2 2009: Berkeley UPC 2.10.0 released!

Downloading and installing Berkeley UPC

There are several ways to get Berkeley UPC running on your system:

If you are running Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X, you can download a binary installer for your machine.
You can build from source. There are three ways to do this:
1. Download our runtime source distribution and build it by following the instructions in the INSTALL file. By default, our 'upcc' front-end will transparently use our HTTP-based public UPC-to-C translator during compilation. This is the easiest and quickest way to build from source.
2. Alternatively, you can download both the runtime and our UPC-to-C translator, build them, and then point your runtime at your translator (instructions are in the runtime's INSTALL). This allows you to compile UPC code without being connected to the Internet, and may also result in slightly faster compilation times.
3. Finally, you can download both the runtime and the GCC UPC binary compiler, build them, and point your runtime at your GCC UPC installation (see the runtime's INSTALL file for details). With this configuration, the Berkeley 'upcc' script is used as the front end, but uses the GCC UPC 'upc' compiler to actually compile. The resulting executables are automatically linked to the Berkeley UPC runtime library, and can thus run over any of our supported networks, using our normal 'upcrun' job spawner.

Supported platforms

Berkeley UPC has been tested and is known to work on the following system configurations:

Platform Characteristic: Tested/supported configurations

Network Hardware / API SMP, MPI 1.1/2.x, Ethernet UDP, Myrinet GM, Quadrics ELAN 3/4, Mellanox InfiniBand VAPI, OpenIB InfiniBand verbs, IBM LAPI, Cray XT Portals, IBM BlueGene/P DCMF, Dolphin SCI, SHMEM (on SGI Altix and Cray X1 systems)

Operating Systems Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Tru64, AIX, IRIX, HPUX, Solaris, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Cray Unicos, NEC SuperUX

CPU / System Architecture x86, Itanium, Opteron, Athlon, Alpha, PowerPC, MIPS, PA-RISC, SPARC, Cray T3E, Cray X1/X1E, Cray XD1, Cray XT3, SX-6, SGI Altix, IBM BlueGene/P, SiCortex, Playstation3. (Experimental support for IBM Blue Gene/L: contact us for details)

C compiler GNU GCC, Intel C, Portland Group C, SunPro C, Compaq C, HP C, MIPSPro C, IBM VisualAge C, Cray C, NEC C, Pathscale C

Most combinations of the platforms above are supported and functional, and other unlisted platforms may work as well. See the GASNet README for the specific combinations that we've personally tested. Many of the systems listed above support both a vendor-specific C compiler and can also use gcc as the underlying C compiler - we generally recommend the vendor C compiler for performance reasons.

Note: on some of these platforms, the Berkeley UPC runtime builds, but the Berkeley UPC-to-C translator does not. When this is the case, network access to our public HTTP-based translator (or to a remote HTTP/SSH translator you set up) is needed to build UPC programs. See here for a list of platforms where the translator is known to work.

We are interested in supporting Berkeley UPC on as wide a variety of parallel systems as possible. If your system or network is not supported, and you are willing to let us use your resources for development, please contact us.

Licensing

The Berkeley UPC suite is comprised entirely of open source code. Different licenses are used for different components, however:

All original code in the UPC runtime uses a BSD license.
- The GASNet networking library used by the runtime also uses a BSD license.
- The memory allocation library ("umalloc") used by the runtime is derived from source in the GNU gdb debugger, and is licensed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL).
The UPC-to-C translator is derived from the Open64 project code (originally open-sourced by SGI), and is licensed under the GNU Public License (GPL).

For more information, see the LICENSE files in the source distributions.

Known bugs and limitations

A list of known bugs and limitations in the current implementation is kept in the Berkeley UPC User's Guide.

Feedback

If you encounter a bug, please go to our Bugzilla server and enter a new bug report it if the issue is not already in our database.

You may also send email to our mailing list for UPC users:

We are interested in supporting the runtime on as wide a variety of parallel systems as possible. If your system or network is not supported, and you are willing to let us use your resources for development, please contact us.

We very much appreciate your feedback.