Date : Friday, March 1, 2002 at 11:00 AM, refreshments at 10:45 AM, Tower Room, T-3

SPEAKER: Tarek El-Ghazawi

ABSTRACT

UPC, or Unified Parallel C, is a parallel extension of ANSI C. UPC is the result of a research collaboration among the members of a consortium of academia, industry and government. UPC follows a distributed shared memory programming model aimed at leveraging the ease of programming of the shared memory paradigm, while enabling the exploitation of data locality as in the message passing paradigm. To this end, UPC incorporates constructs that can partition and place data such that shared data objects are local to the threads that manipulate them in order to minimize remote accesses. UPC has been gaining rising support by vendors and there has been several exploratory compilers available for parallel machines including Compaq Alpha Server SC, Cray T3E, and Origin 2000, to name a few.

This talk will survey some of the UPC language key concepts and constructs, and present some of the early experimental results. The results will show that through compiler optimizations or proper tuning, UPC can favorably compare with message passing, while the shared-memory model ease of programming is enjoyed.