Berkeley UPC beta release 2

jcduell_at_lbl_dot_gov
Date: Sun Aug 14 2005 - 19:16:57 PDT

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    Dear UPC-lovers,
    
    The Berkeley UPC group is pleased to announce the our second 'beta'
    release (2.1.18), available now at
    
        http://upc.lbl.gov/download/
    
    A list of new features is below.
    
    We plan to ship our 2.2 release by the end of this week, based on this
    code.  We are making this second beta available so that interested
    parties can point out any last-minute bugs that may be of special
    concern to them before we ship the official release.
    
    There is thus NO BETTER TIME THAN NOW to give our code a spin, if you
    plan to use our upcoming release.  Our bug server is, as always, at
    
        http://mantis.lbl.gov/bugzilla/
    
    The lazy and/or furtive may alternatively email us at upc_at_lbl_dot_gov.
    
    Happy parallel programming, 
    
    -- 
    Jason Duell             Future Technologies Group
    <jcduell_at_lbl_dot_gov>       Computational Research Division
    Tel: +1-510-495-2354    Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
    
    ------------------------------------------
    New Features since beta 1 (version 2.1.0):
    ------------------------------------------
    - Fully compliant with the UPC 1.2 language specification, including
      support for UPC collectives and the optional UPC-IO interface.
    - Berkeley UPC programs can now be debugged with Totalview on x86 over
      MPI or Quadrics.
    - UPC-to-C translator now supported on Linux Itanium and Opteron
      systems.
    - Experimental support for faster 'symmetric' shared pointers (with
      blocksize == 1 or indefinite blocksize) on smp-pthreads and SHMEM.  
    - Experimental support for optimizations at the UPC language level
      within our UPC-to-C translator: 'upcc -opt ...' to use.
    - Improve the performance of local shared accesses
    - Substantial performance improvements to the upc_lock library
    - New bupc_ptradd library extension enables pointer-to-shared arithmetic
      with a variable (non-constant) blocksize
    - New bupc_tick_t library extensions expose cycle-granularity wall-clock
      timers to UPC code.
    - Performance improvements to bupc_mem{put,get,cpy}_async
    - Added prototype implementation of proposed UPC semaphore library
    - bupc_collectivev.h provides a convenience wrapper that adds
      simple-to-use value-based collectives. 
    - Add library extensions for printing to and controlling communication
      tracing
    - Myrinet/GM-based Berkeley UPC programs can now interoperate with MPI.
    - Many GASNet performance/functionality improvements (see
      GASNet/ChangeLog)
    - Cross-compilation support for the Cray X-1
    - Experimental support for the Cray XT3 and IBM Blue Gene/L (contact us
      for details)
    - Improve the flexibility of max shared heap size
    - Add automatic malloc heap debug checking in --enable-debug mode
    - Add automatic cache alignment for large shared heap objects
    - Improve processor affinity of shared heap objects in pthreaded configs
    - New upcc -pg option embeds gprof sequential profiling information, if
      supported by the C compiler.
    - Improved upcc heuristic detection of C/UPC header language mode
    - Expand upcrun -i to show more useful program information
    - Improved creation and error checking for program stack under pthreads
    - Various improvements to upc_trace
    - Many, many bug fixes, for both language constructs and platform
      portability. See http://upc-bugs.lbl.gov for complete details.
    
    ---------------------------------------
    Changes since our last release (2.0.1):
    ---------------------------------------
    - Added a reference implementation of the UPC I/O spec.  This
      implementation is not designed to be highly performant, but it is
      believed to be complete and stable.
    - The SHMEM network API is now supported, at least on SGI Altix and Cray
      X1 systems.
    - Support for Quadrics' Elan 4 API added.  Performance tuning is not yet
      complete, but the implementation is stable.
    - Support for using GCC/UPC 3.3.2.9.  You must upgrade to this version
      of the runtime if you wish to use this version (or greater) of
      GCC/UPC, due to changes in the GCC/UPC interface.
    - Improved the automated UPC test harness to support any UPC 1.1
      compiler
    

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