Berkeley UPC - Unified Parallel C

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Latest News: October 28, 2022: Berkeley UPC 2022.10.0 released!

Downloading and Installing Berkeley UPC

There are two main steps to get UPC running on your system using the Berkeley UPC Runtime. You will need to build from source on your system, and there are several ways to do this depending on what option(s) you want for UPC translation/compilation.

Required component: The Berkeley UPC Runtime/driver package

The Berkeley UPC Runtime is required by all configurations.

Berkeley UPC runtime (and compiler driver), version 2022.10.0

On macOS, Berkeley UPC requires the Apple Xcode command line tools.

On Microsoft Windows, Berkeley UPC requires either Cygwin or Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux.
Source Download: berkeley_upc-2022.10.0.tar.gz (5.7MB)
MD5 Hash = 15292fd2e582b4bc03aeb2d804c053a6

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The runtime works on all our supported platforms.

The runtime distribution includes the GASNet portable networking library--if you wish to download GASNet separately, you can get it from the GASNet website.

INSTALL.TXT explains how to configure and build the Berkeley UPC runtime, including optional directions for configuring the 'upcc' driver to use any of the five UPC compiler options listed in the next step. The 'upcc' compiler driver defaults to transparently using a public online translator for UPC compilation. Provided your system will have an Internet connection during UPC compilation, this is the easiest and quickest install to get started (and you can stop here).

Optional component: Install a UPC translator/compiler

There are several options for UPC compilation using the Berkeley UPC Runtime. In all cases the same 'upcc' driver is used, and the resulting executables are linked to the Berkeley UPC Runtime and GASNet libraries, and can thus run over any of our supported networks, using the same 'upcrun' job spawner.

Currently five options, encompassing four distinct translators and compilers, are supported:

Network-based Berkeley UPC-to-C (BUPC) translator (default)
The 'upcc' compiler driver defaults to transparently using our online Berkeley UPC-to-C translator for UPC compilation. Provided your system will have an Internet connection during UPC compilation, this is the easiest and quickest install to get started and requires no additional steps.
Locally-built Clang UPC2C (CUPC2C) translator
You can download and install Clang UPC2C. You will then configure the runtime to use the Clang UPC2C source-to-source translator. With this configuration, the Berkeley 'upcc' compiler driver uses 'clang-upc2c' to perform source-to-source translation.
Locally-built Berkeley UPC-to-C (BUPC) translator
You can download and install the Berkeley UPC-to-C translator, and configure the UPC Runtime to use your local build of the translator.
Locally-built Clang UPC (CUPC) compiler
You can download and install Clang UPC. You will then configure the runtime to use the Clang UPC compiler. With this configuration, the Berkeley 'upcc' compiler driver uses 'clang-upc' to compile UPC code. This option differs from CUPC2C in that 'clang-upc' compiles UPC directly to binary without source-to-source translation. Also, 'clang-upc' only supports the process-per-UPC-thread model (not the POSIX-thread-per-UPC-thread model).
Locally-built GNU UPC (GUPC) compiler
You can download and install the GNU UPC compiler. You will then configure the runtime to use your GNU UPC installation. With this configuration, the Berkeley 'upcc' compiler driver uses the GNU UPC 'gupc' compiler to compile UPC code.

Additionally, one can choose to build two or more of BUPC, CUPC2C, CUPC, or GUPC and setup the 'upcc' driver to select a translator or compiler based on compile-time arguments. See INSTALL.TXT for more information. Platform support for each option varies - see the documentation for each translator for details.

Supported platforms

The current release of 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 and higher, Ethernet UDP, OpenIB InfiniBand verbs, Cray XC Aries, HPE Slingshot, Intel Omni-Path, OpenFabrics LibFabric, Unified Communication X (EXPERIMENTAL),

Operating Systems Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows (Cygwin or WSL), Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, various compute-node kernels

CPU / System Architecture x86, x86-64, PowerPC, Cray XC series, HPE Cray EX, Intel KNL, ARM, AARCH64, MIPS, SPARC v8+

C compiler Gnu (gcc 3.0+), LLVM (clang 3.6+), Apple (Xcode 7.1+), Intel (icc 16+), Intel oneAPI (icx 2021.1.2+), IBM XL (xlc 13+), PGI (pgcc 11.0 through 20.4), NVHPC (nvc 20.9+), Cray (CCE 8.6+)

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 works, but the Berkeley UPC-to-C translator does not. In such a case, you'll likely want the default upcc configuration which uses our internet-based BUPC translator for building UPC programs, or alternatively can consider one of the other UPC translation options. See here for a list of platforms where a local install of the Berkeley UPC 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 uses the BSD-3-Clause-LBNL license.
- The memory allocation library ("umalloc") used by the runtime is derived from source in the GNU gdb debugger, and is licensed under version 2 (or later) of the GNU Lesser General Public License (GNU LGPL).
The Berkeley UPC-to-C translator is derived from the Open64 project code (originally open-sourced by SGI), and is licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GNU GPLv2).

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

Known bugs and limitations

The current releases lack support for the Cray Gemini network backend (for Cray XE and XK series systems), and the PAMI network backend (for the BlueGene/Q system). For users of these older machines, we recommend the use of a previous release: Berkeley UPC release 2019.4.2.
Current releases have experimental support for the libfabric (ofi) network backend. We recommend it only for users with HPE Slingshot or Intel Omni-Path hardware.
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.