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