Skip to navigation Skip to content
Careers | Phone Book | A - Z Index
Computer Languages & Systems Software

Paul H. Hargrove

PHHargrove copy
Paul H. Hargrove Ph.D.
Computer Systems Engineer 5
Computer Science Department
Pacific Time
San Francisco, California

Education

Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, Ph.D., 2003.
Scientific Computing – Computational Mathematics Program

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, B.A., 1994.
Triple major: Computer Science, Physics (magna cum laude), and Mathematics

Biographical Sketch

Paul has been a PI at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) since September 2000. Current research focuses on network communications for HPC. His current software projects include UPC++, and Global Address Space Networking (GASNet-EX).

UPC++ is a C++ library-based implementation of the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming model which complements one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) with Remote Procedure Call (RPC). GASNet-EX provides an abstraction of a network interconnect suitable for implementation of PGAS libraries and languages such as UPC++, UPC, Chapel, Legion and Fortran08 coarrays (among others). GASNet is intended for use by PGAS library writers and as a compilation target. GASNet provides one-sided RMA transfers with a rich set of non-blocking primitives and Active Messages (AM).

Paul is PI of the Pagoda project, funded by the US Department of Energy's Exascale Computing Project (ECP), under which UPC++ and GASNet-EX are developed.

Publication Lists:

Journal Articles

Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, "GASNet-EX: A High-Performance, Portable Communication Library for Exascale", LNCS 11882: Proceedings of Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC'18), edited by Hall M., Sundar H., November 2019, 11882:138-158, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-34627-0_11

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) models, typified by such languages as Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Co-Array Fortran, expose one-sided communication as a key building block for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Architectural trends in supercomputing make such programming models increasingly attractive, and newer, more sophisticated models such as UPC++, Legion and Chapel that rely upon similar communication paradigms are gaining popularity.

GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models in future exascale machines. The library is an evolution of the popular GASNet communication system, building upon over 15 years of lessons learned. We describe and evaluate several features and enhancements that have been introduced to address the needs of modern client systems. Microbenchmark results demonstrate the RMA performance of GASNet-EX is competitive with several MPI-3 implementations on current HPC systems.

Rajesh Nishtala, Yili Zheng, Paul Hargrove, Katherine A. Yelick, "Tuning collective communication for Partitioned Global Address Space programming models", Parallel Computing, September 2011, 37(9):576--591, doi: 10.1016/j.parco.2011.05.006

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages offer programmers the convenience of a shared memory programming style combined with locality control necessary to run on large-scale distributed memory systems. Even within a PGAS language programmers often need to perform global communication operations such as broadcasts or reductions, which are best performed as collective operations in which a group of threads work together to perform the operation. In this paper we consider the problem of implementing collective communication within PGAS languages and explore some of the design trade-offs in both the interface and implementation. In particular, PGAS collectives have semantic issues that are different than in send–receive style message passing programs, and different implementation approaches that take advantage of the one-sided communication style in these languages. We present an implementation framework for PGAS collectives as part of the GASNet communication layer, which supports shared memory, distributed memory and hybrids. The framework supports a broad set of algorithms for each collective, over which the implementation may be automatically tuned. Finally, we demonstrate the benefit of optimized GASNet collectives using application benchmarks written in UPC, and demonstrate that the GASNet collectives can deliver scalable performance on a variety of state-of-the-art parallel machines including a Cray XT4, an IBM BlueGene/P, and a Sun Constellation system with InfiniBand interconnect.

Hongzhang Shan, Filip Blagojevic, Seung-Jai Min, Paul Hargrove, Haoqiang Jin, Karl Fuerlinger, Alice Koniges, Nicholas J. Wright, "A Programming Model Performance Study Using the NAS Parallel Benchmarks", Scientific Programming -Exploring Languages for Expressing Medium to Massive On-Chip Parallelism, August 1, 2010, vol.18, doi: 10.3233/SPR-2010-0306

B Bode, R Bradshaw, E DeBenedictus, N Desai, J Duell, G A Geist, P Hargrove, D Jackson, S Jackson, J Laros, C Lowe, E Lusk, W McLendon, J Mugler, T Naughton, J P Navarro, R Oldfield, N Pundit, S L Scott, M Showerman, C Steffen, K Walker, "Scalable system software: a component-based approach", Journal of Physics: Conference Series, January 2005, 16:546-550, doi: 10.1088/1742-6596/16/1/075

Conference Papers

Julian Bellavita, Mathias Jacquelin, Esmond G. Ng, Dan Bonachea, Johnny Corbino, Paul H. Hargrove, "symPACK: A GPU-Capable Fan-Out Sparse Cholesky Solver", 2023 IEEE/ACM Parallel Applications Workshop, Alternatives To MPI+X (PAW-ATM'23), ACM, November 13, 2023, doi: 10.1145/3624062.3624600

Sparse symmetric positive definite systems of equations are ubiquitous in scientific workloads and applications. Parallel sparse Cholesky factorization is the method of choice for solving such linear systems. Therefore, the development of parallel sparse Cholesky codes that can efficiently run on today’s large-scale heterogeneous distributed-memory platforms is of vital importance. Modern supercomputers offer nodes that contain a mix of CPUs and GPUs. To fully utilize the computing power of these nodes, scientific codes must be adapted to offload expensive computations to GPUs.

We present symPACK, a GPU-capable parallel sparse Cholesky solver that uses one-sided communication primitives and remote procedure calls provided by the UPC++ library. We also utilize the UPC++ "memory kinds" feature to enable efficient communication of GPU-resident data. We show that on a number of large problems, symPACK outperforms comparable state-of-the-art GPU-capable Cholesky factorization codes by up to 14x on the NERSC Perlmutter supercomputer.

Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, "GASNet-EX RMA Communication Performance on Recent Supercomputing Systems", 5th Annual Parallel Applications Workshop, Alternatives To MPI+X (PAW-ATM'22), November 2022, doi: 10.25344/S40C7D

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming models, typified by systems such as Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Fortran coarrays, expose one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) communication as a key building block for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Architectural trends in supercomputing make such programming models increasingly attractive, and newer, more sophisticated models such as UPC++, Legion and Chapel that rely upon similar communication paradigms are gaining popularity.

GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models in emerging exascale machines. The library is an evolution of the popular GASNet communication system, building upon 20 years of lessons learned. We present microbenchmark results which demonstrate the RMA performance of GASNet-EX is competitive with MPI implementations on four recent, high-impact, production HPC systems. These results are an update relative to previously published results on older systems. The networks measured here are representative of hardware currently used in six of the top ten fastest supercomputers in the world, and all of the exascale systems on the U.S. DOE road map.

Talk Slides

Daniel Waters, Colin A. MacLean, Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, "Demonstrating UPC++/Kokkos Interoperability in a Heat Conduction Simulation (Extended Abstract)", Parallel Applications Workshop, Alternatives To MPI+X (PAW-ATM), November 2021, doi: 10.25344/S4630V


We describe the replacement of MPI with UPC++ in an existing Kokkos code that simulates heat conduction within a rectangular 3D object, as well as an analysis of the new code’s performance on CUDA accelerators. The key challenges were packing the halos in Kokkos data structures in a way that allowed for UPC++ remote memory access, and streamlining synchronization costs. Additional UPC++ abstractions used included global pointers, distributed objects, remote procedure calls, and futures. We also make use of the device allocator concept to facilitate data management in memory with unique properties, such as GPUs. Our results demonstrate that despite the algorithm’s good semantic match to message passing abstractions, straightforward modifications to use UPC++ communication deliver vastly improved performance and scalability in the common case. We find the one-sided UPC++ version written in a natural way exhibits good performance, whereas the message-passing version written in a straightforward way exhibits performance anomalies. We argue this represents a productivity benefit for one-sided communication models.

PAW-ATM'21

Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, "Efficient Active Message RMA in GASNet Using a Target-Side Reassembly Protocol (Extended Abstract)", IEEE/ACM Parallel Applications Workshop, Alternatives To MPI+X (PAW-ATM), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Technical Report, November 17, 2019, LBNL 2001238, doi: 10.25344/S4PC7M

GASNet is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models on future exascale machines. This paper investigates strategies for efficient implementation of GASNet’s “AM Long” API that couples an RMA (Remote Memory Access) transfer with an Active Message (AM) delivery.
We discuss several network-level protocols for AM Long and propose a new target-side reassembly protocol. We present a microbenchmark evaluation on the Cray XC Aries network hardware. The target-side reassembly protocol on this network improves AM Long end-to-end latency by up to 33%, and the effective bandwidth by up to 49%, while also enabling asynchronous source completion that drastically reduces injection overheads.
The improved AM Long implementation for Aries is available in GASNet-EX release v2019.9.0 and later.

John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, Hadia Ahmed, "UPC++: A High-Performance Communication Framework for Asynchronous Computation", 33rd IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS'19), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, IEEE, May 2019, doi: 10.25344/S4V88H

UPC++ is a C++ library that supports high-performance computation via an asynchronous communication framework. This paper describes a new incarnation that differs substantially from its predecessor, and we discuss the reasons for our design decisions. We present new design features, including future-based asynchrony management, distributed objects, and generalized Remote Procedure Call (RPC).
We show microbenchmark performance results demonstrating that one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) in UPC++ is competitive with MPI-3 RMA; on a Cray XC40 UPC++ delivers up to a 25% improvement in the latency of blocking RMA put, and up to a 33% bandwidth improvement in an RMA throughput test. We showcase the benefits of UPC++ with irregular applications through a pair of application motifs, a distributed hash table and a sparse solver component. Our distributed hash table in UPC++ delivers near-linear weak scaling up to 34816 cores of a Cray XC40. Our UPC++ implementation of the sparse solver component shows robust strong scaling up to 2048 cores, where it outperforms variants communicating using MPI by up to 3.1x.
UPC++ encourages the use of aggressive asynchrony in low-overhead RMA and RPC, improving programmer productivity and delivering high performance in irregular applications.

Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, "GASNet-EX Performance Improvements Due to Specialization for the Cray Aries Network", Parallel Applications Workshop, Alternatives To MPI (PAW-ATM), Dallas, Texas, USA, IEEE, November 16, 2018, 23-33, doi: 10.25344/S44S38

GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models on future exascale machines. This paper reports on the improvements in performance observed on Cray XC-series systems due to enhancements made to the GASNet-EX software. These enhancements, known as "specializations", primarily consist of replacing network-independent implementations of several recently added features with implementations tailored to the Cray Aries network. Performance gains from specialization include (1) Negotiated-Payload Active Messages improve bandwidth of a ping-pong test by up to 14%, (2) Immediate Operations reduce running time of a synthetic benchmark by up to 93%, (3) non-bulk RMA Put bandwidth is increased by up to 32%, (4) Remote Atomic performance is 70% faster than the reference on a point-to-point test and allows a hot-spot test to scale robustly, and (5) non-contiguous RMA interfaces see up to 8.6x speedups for an intra-node benchmark and 26% for inter-node. These improvements are all available in GASNet-EX version 2018.3.0 and later.

Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, "GASNet-EX: A High-Performance, Portable Communication Library for Exascale", Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC'18), Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, October 11, 2018, LBNL 2001174, doi: 10.25344/S4QP4W

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) models, typified by such languages as Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Co-Array Fortran, expose one-sided communication as a key building block for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Architectural trends in supercomputing make such programming models increasingly attractive, and newer, more sophisticated models such as UPC++, Legion and Chapel that rely upon similar communication paradigms are gaining popularity.

GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models in future exascale machines. The library is an evolution of the popular GASNet communication system, building upon over 15 years of lessons learned. We describe and evaluate several features and enhancements that have been introduced to address the needs of modern client systems. Microbenchmark results demonstrate the RMA performance of GASNet-EX is competitive with several MPI-3 implementations on current HPC systems.

John Bachan, Dan Bonachea, Paul H Hargrove, Steve Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, Scott B Baden, "The UPC++ PGAS library for Exascale Computing", Proceedings of the Second Annual PGAS Applications Workshop (PAW17), November 13, 2017, doi: 10.1145/3144779.3169108

We describe UPC++ V1.0, a C++11 library that supports APGAS programming. UPC++ targets distributed data structures where communication is irregular or fine-grained. The key abstractions are global pointers, asynchronous programming via RPC, and futures. Global pointers incorporate ownership information useful in optimizing for locality. Futures capture data readiness state, are useful for scheduling and also enable the programmer to chain operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies become satisfied, via continuations. The interfaces for moving non-contiguous data and handling memories with different optimal access methods are composable and closely resemble those used in modern C++. Communication in UPC++ runs at close to hardware speeds by utilizing the low-overhead GASNet-EX communication library.

D Ozog, A Kamil, Y Zheng, P Hargrove, JR Hammond, A Malony, WD Jong, K Yelick, "A Hartree-Fock Application Using UPC++ and the New DArray Library", 30th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), IEEE, May 23, 2016, 453--462, doi: 10.1109/IPDPS.2016.108

The Hartree-Fock (HF) method is the fundamental first step for incorporating quantum mechanics into many-electron simulations of atoms and molecules, and it is an important component of computational chemistry toolkits like NWChem. The GTFock code is an HF implementation that, while it does not have all the features in NWChem, represents crucial algorithmic advances that reduce communication and improve load balance by doing an up-front static partitioning of tasks, followed by work stealing whenever necessary. To enable innovations in algorithms and exploit next generation exascale systems, it is crucial to support quantum chemistry codes using expressive and convenient programming models and runtime systems that are also efficient and scalable. This paper presents an HF implementation similar to GTFock using UPC++, a partitioned global address space model that includes flexible communication, asynchronous remote computation, and a powerful multidimensional array library. UPC++ offers runtime features that are useful for HF such as active messages, a rich calculus for array operations, hardware-supported fetch-and-add, and functions for ensuring asynchronous runtime progress. We present a new distributed array abstraction, DArray, that is convenient for the kinds of random-access array updates and linear algebra operations on block-distributed arrays with irregular data ownership. We analyze the performance of atomic fetch-and-add operations (relevant for load balancing) and runtime attentiveness, then compare various techniques and optimizations for each. Our optimized implementation of HF using UPC++ and the DArrays library shows up to 20% improvement over GTFock with Global Arrays at scales up to 24,000 cores.

George Almasi, Paul Hargrove, Gabriel Tanase and Yili Zheng, "UPC Collectives Library 2.0", Fifth Conference on Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Models (PGAS11), October 17, 2011,

Collective communication has been a part of the UPC standard since having been introduced in 2005 with the UPC Specification version 1.2. However, unlike MPI collectives, UPC collectives have never caught on and are rarely used.
In this paper we identify and discuss several fundamental limitations and important missing features in the design of the existing UPC collectives Next, we propose a new, consistent, portable and high performance collectives library that is aimed to augment UPC with a full complement of the collectives used by MPI. Ours is a pure library based approach; we change none of the functions in the existing UPC specification.that make them inconvenient to use and unsuitable for performance optimization.
We discuss the implementation requirements for this new UPC collectives library, and how our design attempts to minimize the implementation effort by enabling the reuse of existing collective implementations.

Chang-Seo Park, Koushik Sen, Paul Hargrove, Costin Iancu, "Efficient data race detection for distributed memory parallel programs", Supercomputing (SC), 2011,

Keren Bergman, Gilbert Hendry, Paul Hargrove, John Shalf, Bruce Jacob, K. Scott Hemmert, Arun Rodrigues, David Resnick, "Let there be light!: the future of memory systems is photonics and 3D stacking", Proceedings of the 2011 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Memory Systems Performance and Correctness (MSPC'11), San Jose, California, June 5, 2011, 43-48, doi: 10.1145/1988915.1988926

Filip Blagojevic, Paul Hargrove, Costin Iancu, and Katherine Yelick,, "Hybrid PGAS runtime support for multicore nodes", Fourth Conference on Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Model (PGAS), October 2010, doi: 10.1145/2020373.2020376

With multicore processors as the standard building block for high performance systems, parallel runtime systems need to provide excellent performance on shared memory, distributed memory, and hybrids. Conventional wisdom suggests that threads should be used as the runtime mechanism within shared memory, and two runtime versions for shared and distributed memory are often designed and implemented separately, retrofitting after the fact for hybrid systems. In this paper we consider the problem of implementing a runtime layer for Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages, which offer a uniform programming abstraction for hybrid machines. We present a new process-based shared memory runtime and compare it to our previous pthreads implementation. Both are integrated with the GASNet communication layer, and they can co-exist with one another. We evaluate the shared memory runtime approaches, showing that they interact in important and sometimes surprising ways with the communication layer. Using a set of microbenchmarks and application level benchmarks on an IBM BG/P, Cray XT, and InfiniBand cluster, we show that threads, processes and combinations of both are needed for maximum performance. Our new runtime shows speedups of over 60% for application benchmarks and 100% for collective communication benchmarks, when compared to the previous implementation. Our work primarily targets PGAS languages, but some of the lessons are relevant to other parallel runtime systems and libraries.

Joshua Hursey, Chris January, Mark O'Connor, Paul Hargrove, David Lecomber, Jeffrey M. Squyres, Andrew Lumsdaine, "Checkpoint/Restart-Enabled Parallel Debugging", Recent Advances in the Message Passing Interface (Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volume 6305), Springer, 2010, 219-228, doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-15646-5_23

Rinku Gupta, Peter H. Beckman, Byung-Hoon Park, Ewing L. Lusk, Paul Hargrove, Al Geist, Dhabaleswar K. Panda, Andrew Lumsdaine, Jack Dongarra, "CIFTS: A Coordinated Infrastructure for Fault-Tolerant Systems", International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP 2009), Vienna, Austria, September 2009, 237-245, doi: 10.1109/ICPP.2009.20

Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Mike Welcome, Katherine Yelick, "Porting GASNet to Portals: Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) Language Support for the Cray XT", Cray Users Group (CUG), May 2009, doi: 10.25344/S4RP46

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) Languages are an emerging alternative to MPI for HPC applications development. The GASNet library from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the University of California at Berkeley provides the network runtime for multiple implementations of four PGAS Languages: Unified Parallel C (UPC), Co-Array Fortran (CAF), Titanium and Chapel. GASNet provides a low overhead one-sided communication layer has enabled portability and high performance of PGAS languages. This paper describes our experiences porting GASNet to the Portals network API on the Cray XT series.

Rajesh Nishtala, Paul Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, Katherine Yelick, "Scaling Communication-Intensive Applications on BlueGene/P Using One-Sided Communication and Overlap", 23rd International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), May 2009, doi: 10.1109/IPDPS.2009.5161076

In earlier work, we showed that the one-sided communication model found in PGAS languages (such as UPC) offers significant advantages in communication efficiency by decoupling data transfer from processor synchronization. We explore the use of the PGAS model on IBM Blue-Gene/P, an architecture that combines low-power, quad-core processors with extreme scalability. We demonstrate that the PGAS model, using a new port of the Berkeley UPC compiler and GASNet one-sided communication layer, outperforms two-sided (MPI) communication in both microbenchmarks and a case study of the communication-limited benchmark, NAS FT. We scale the benchmark up to 16,384 cores of the BlueGene/P and demonstrate that UPC consistently outperforms MPI by as much as 66% for some processor configurations and an average of 32%. In addition, the results demonstrate the scalability of the PGAS model and the Berkeley implementation of UPC, the viability of using it on machines with multicore nodes, and the effectiveness of the BG/P communication layer for supporting one-sided communication and PGAS languages.

Katherine Yelick, Dan Bonachea, Wei-Yu Chen, Phillip Colella, Kaushik Datta, Jason Duell, Susan L. Graham, Paul Hargrove, Paul Hilfinger, Parry Husbands, Costin Iancu, Amir Kamil, Rajesh Nishtala, Jimmy Su, Michael Welcome, Tong Wen, "Productivity and Performance Using Partitioned Global Address Space Languages", Proceedings of the 2007 International Workshop on Parallel Symbolic Computation (PASCO), July 2007, 24--32, doi: 10.1145/1278177.1278183

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages combine the programming convenience of shared memory with the locality and performance control of message passing. One such language, Unified Parallel C (UPC) is an extension of ISO C defined by a consortium that boasts multiple proprietary and open source compilers. Another PGAS language, Titanium, is a dialect of Java T M designed for high performance scientific computation. In this paper we describe some of the highlights of two related projects, the Titanium project centered at U.C. Berkeley and the UPC project centered at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Both compilers use a source-to-source strategy that translates the parallel languages to C with calls to a communication layer called GASNet. The result is portable high-performance compilers that run on a large variety of shared and distributed memory multiprocessors. Both projects combine compiler, runtime, and application efforts to demonstrate some of the performance and productivity advantages to these languages.

Paul Hargrove, Jason Duell, "Berkeley Lab Checkpoint/Restart (BLCR) for Linux Clusters", Proceedings of SciDAC 2006, June 27, 2006, doi: 10.1088/1742-6596/46/1/067

This article describes the motivation, design and implementation of Berkeley Lab Checkpoint/Restart (BLCR), a system-level checkpoint/restart implementation for Linux clusters that targets the space of typical High Performance Computing applications, including MPI. Application-level solutions, including both checkpointing and fault-tolerant algorithms, are recognized as more time and space efficient than system-level checkpoints, which cannot make use of any application-specific knowledge. However, system-level checkpointing allows for preemption, making it suitable for responding to ''fault precursors'' (for instance, elevated error rates from ECC memory or network CRCs, or elevated temperature from sensors). Preemption can also increase the efficiency of batch scheduling; for instance reducing idle cycles (by allowing for shutdown without any queue draining period or reallocation of resources to eliminate idle nodes when better fitting jobs are queued), and reducing the average queued time (by limiting large jobs to running during off-peak hours, without the need to limit the length of such jobs). Each of these potential uses makes BLCR a valuable tool for efficient resource management in Linux clusters.

Costin Iancu, Parry Husbands, Paul Hargrove, "HUNTing the Overlap", IEEE Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), September 2005, doi: 10.1109/PACT.2005.25

Hiding communication latency is an important optimization for parallel programs. Programmers or compilers achieve this by using non-blocking communication primitives and overlapping communication with computation or other communication operations. Using non-blocking communication raises two issues: performance and programmability. In terms of performance, optimizers need to find a good communication schedule and are sometimes constrained by lack of full application knowledge. In terms of programmability, efficiently managing non-blocking communication can prove cumbersome for complex applications. In this paper we present the design principles of HUNT, a runtime system designed to search and exploit some of the available overlap present at execution time in UPC programs. Using virtual memory support, our runtime implements demand-driven synchronization for data involved in communication operations. It also employs message decomposition and scheduling heuristics to transparently improve the non-blocking behavior of applications. We provide a user level implementation of HUNT on a variety of modern high performance computing systems. Results indicate that our approach is successful in finding some of the overlap available at execution time. While system and application characteristics influence performance, perhaps the determining factor is the time taken by the CPU to execute a signal handler. Demand driven synchronization at execution time eliminates the need for the explicit management of non-blocking communication. Besides increasing programmer productivity, this feature also simplifies compiler analysis for communication optimizations.

S. Sankaran, J. M. Squyres, B. Barrett, A. Lumsdaine, J. Duell, P. Hargrove, E. Roman, "The LAM/MPI Checkpoint/Restart Framework: System-Initiated Checkpointing", Los Alamos Computer Science Institute Symposium Proceedings (LACSI'03), Santa Fe, NM, October 2003,

Christian Bell, Dan Bonachea, Yannick Cote, Jason Duell, Paul Hargrove, Parry Husbands, Costin Iancu, Michael L. Welcome, Katherine A. Yelick, "An Evaluation of Current High-Performance Networks", Proceedings of the International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), April 22, 2003, doi: 10.1109/IPDPS.2003.1213106

High-end supercomputers are increasingly built out of commodity components, and lack tight integration between the processor and network. This often results in inefficiencies in the communication subsystem, such as high software overheads and/or message latencies. In this paper we use a set of microbenchmarks to quantify the cost of this commoditization, measuring software overhead, latency, and bandwidth on five contemporary supercomputing networks. We compare the performance of the ubiquitous MPI layer to that of lower-level communication layers, and quantify the advantages of the latter for small message performance. We also provide data on the potential for various communication-related optimizations, such as overlapping communication with computation or other communication. Finally, we determine the minimum size needed for a message to be considered 'large' (i.e., bandwidth-bound) on these platforms, and provide historical data on the software overheads of a number of supercomputers over the past decade.

Book Chapters

Paul H. Hargrove, "Global Address Space Networking", Programming Models for Parallel Computing, edited by Pavan Balaji, (MIT Press: 2015)

Presentation/Talks

Michelle Mills Strout, Damian Rouson, Amir Kamil, Dan Bonachea, Jeremiah Corrado, Paul H. Hargrove, Introduction to High-Performance Parallel Distributed Computing using Chapel, UPC++ and Coarray Fortran, Tutorial at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC23), November 12, 2023,

A majority of HPC system users utilize scripting languages such as Python to prototype their computations, coordinate their large executions, and analyze the data resulting from their computations. Python is great for these many uses, but it frequently falls short when significantly scaling up the amount of data and computation, as required to fully leverage HPC system resources. In this tutorial, we show how example computations such as heat diffusion, k-mer counting, file processing, and distributed maps can be written to efficiently leverage distributed computing resources in the Chapel, UPC++, and Fortran parallel programming models.

The tutorial is targeted for users with little-to-no parallel programming experience, but everyone is welcome. A partial differential equation example will be demonstrated in all three programming models. That example and others will be provided to attendees in a virtual environment. Attendees will be shown how to compile and run these programming examples, and the virtual environment will remain available to attendees throughout the conference, along with Slack-based interactive tech support.

Come join us to learn about some productive and performant parallel programming models!

SC23 event page

Michelle Mills Strout, Damian Rouson, Amir Kamil, Dan Bonachea, Jeremiah Corrado, Paul H. Hargrove, Introduction to High-Performance Parallel Distributed Computing using Chapel, UPC++ and Coarray Fortran (CUF23), ECP/NERSC/OLCF Tutorial, July 2023,

A majority of HPC system users utilize scripting languages such as Python to prototype their computations, coordinate their large executions, and analyze the data resulting from their computations. Python is great for these many uses, but it frequently falls short when significantly scaling up the amount of data and computation, as required to fully leverage HPC system resources. In this tutorial, we show how example computations such as heat diffusion, k-mer counting, file processing, and distributed maps can be written to efficiently leverage distributed computing resources in the Chapel, UPC++, and Fortran parallel programming models. This tutorial should be accessible to users with little-to-no parallel programming experience, and everyone is welcome. A partial differential equation example will be demonstrated in all three programming models along with performance and scaling results on big machines. That example and others will be provided in a cloud instance and Docker container. Attendees will be shown how to compile and run these programming examples, and provided opportunities to experiment with different parameters and code alternatives while being able to ask questions and share their own observations. Come join us to learn about some productive and performant parallel programming models!

Secondary tutorial sites by event sponsors:

Paul H. Hargrove, PGAS Programming Models: My 20-year Perspective, Keynote for 10th Annual Chapel Implementers and Users Workshop (CHIUW 2023), June 2, 2023, doi: 10.25344/S4K59C

Paul H. Hargrove has been involved in the world of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming models since 1999, before he knew such a thing existed. Early involvement in the GASNet communications library as used in implementations of UPC, Titanium and Co-array Fortran convinced Paul that one could have productivity and performance without sacrificing one for the other. Since then he has been among the apostates who work to overturn the belief that message-passing is the only (or best) way to program for High-Performance Computing (HPC). Paul has been fortunate to witness the history of the PGAS community through several rare opportunities, including interactions made possible by the wide adoption of GASNet and through operating a PGAS booth at the annual SC conferences from 2007 to 2017. In this talk, Paul will share some highlights of his experiences across 24 years of PGAS history. Among these is the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) project which helped give birth to Chapel.

CHIUW 2023 website

Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, An Introduction to GASNet-EX for Chapel Users, 9th Annual Chapel Implementers and Users Workshop (CHIUW 2022), June 10, 2022,

Have you ever typed "export CHPL_COMM=gasnet"? If you’ve used Chapel with multi-locale support on a system without "Cray" in the model name, then you’ve probably used GASNet. Did you ever wonder what GASNet is? What GASNet should mean to you? This talk aims to answer those questions and more. Chapel has system-specific implementations of multi-locale communication for Cray-branded systems including the Cray XC and HPE Cray EX lines. On other systems, Chapel communication uses the GASNet communication library embedded in third-party/gasnet. In this talk, that third-party will introduce itself to you in the first person.

Video Presentation

Katherine A. Yelick, Amir Kamil, Damian Rouson, Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, UPC++: An Asynchronous RMA/RPC Library for Distributed C++ Applications (SC21), Tutorial at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC21), November 15, 2021,

UPC++ is a C++ library supporting Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. UPC++ offers low-overhead one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), along with future/promise-based asynchrony to express dependencies between computation and asynchronous data movement. UPC++ supports simple/regular data structures as well as more elaborate distributed applications where communication is fine-grained and/or irregular. UPC++ provides a uniform abstraction for one-sided RMA between host and GPU/accelerator memories anywhere in the system. UPC++'s support for aggressive asynchrony enables applications to effectively overlap communication and reduce latency stalls, while the underlying GASNet-EX communication library delivers efficient low-overhead RMA/RPC on HPC networks.

This tutorial introduces UPC++, covering the memory and execution models and basic algorithm implementations. Participants gain hands-on experience incorporating UPC++ features into application proxy examples. We examine a few UPC++ applications with irregular communication (metagenomic assembler and COVID-19 simulation) and describe how they utilize UPC++ to optimize communication performance.

Dan Bonachea, GASNet-EX: A High-Performance, Portable Communication Library for Exascale, Berkeley Lab – CS Seminar, March 10, 2021,

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) models, pioneered by languages such as Unified Parallel C (UPC) and Co-Array Fortran, expose one-sided communication as a key building block for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Architectural trends in supercomputing make such programming models increasingly attractive, and newer, more sophisticated models such as UPC++, Legion and Chapel that rely upon similar communication paradigms are gaining popularity.

GASNet-EX is a portable, open-source, high-performance communication library designed to efficiently support the networking requirements of PGAS runtime systems and other alternative models in future exascale machines. The library is an evolution of the popular GASNet communication system, building on 20 years of lessons learned. We describe several features and enhancements that have been introduced to address the needs of modern runtimes and exploit the hardware capabilities of emerging systems. Microbenchmark results demonstrate the RMA performance of GASNet-EX is competitive with several MPI implementations on current systems. GASNet-EX provides communication services that help to deliver speedups in HPC applications written using the UPC++ library, enabling new science on pre-exascale systems. 

Katherine A. Yelick, Amir Kamil, Dan Bonachea, Paul H Hargrove, UPC++: An Asynchronous RMA/RPC Library for Distributed C++ Applications (SC20), Tutorial at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC20), November 10, 2020,

UPC++ is a C++ library supporting Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The UPC++ API offers low-overhead one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), along with future/promise-based asynchrony to express dependencies between asynchronous computations and data movement. UPC++ supports simple, regular data structures as well as more elaborate distributed structures where communication is fine-grained, irregular, or both. UPC++'s support for aggressive asynchrony enables the application to overlap communication to reduce communication wait times, and the GASNet communication layer provides efficient low-overhead RMA/RPC on HPC networks.

This tutorial introduces basic concepts and advanced optimization techniques of UPC++. We discuss the UPC++ memory and execution models and examine basic algorithm implementations. Participants gain hands-on experience incorporating UPC++ features into several application examples. We also examine two irregular applications (metagenomic assembler and multifrontal sparse solver) and describe how they leverage UPC++ features to optimize communication performance.

 

Amir Kamil, John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Rob Egan, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Kathy Yelick, UPC++: An Asynchronous RMA/RPC Library for Distributed C++ Applications (ALCF'20), Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) Webinar Series, May 27, 2020,

UPC++ is a C++ library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The UPC++ API offers low-overhead one-sided RMA communication and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), along with futures and promises. These constructs enable the programmer to express dependencies between asynchronous computations and data movement. UPC++ supports the implementation of simple, regular data structures as well as more elaborate distributed data structures where communication is fine-grained, irregular, or both. The library’s support for asynchrony enables the application to aggressively overlap and schedule communication and computation to reduce wait times.

UPC++ is highly portable and runs on platforms from laptops to supercomputers, with native implementations for HPC interconnects. As a C++ library, it interoperates smoothly with existing numerical libraries and on-node programming models (e.g., OpenMP, CUDA).

In this webinar, hosted by DOE’s Exascale Computing Project and the ALCF, we will introduce basic concepts and advanced optimization techniques of UPC++. We will discuss the UPC++ memory and execution models and walk through basic algorithm implementations. We will also look at irregular applications and show how they can take advantage of UPC++ features to optimize their performance.

ALCF'20 Event page

ALCF'20 Video recording

Amir Kamil, John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Rob Egan, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Kathy Yelick, UPC++: A PGAS/RPC Library for Asynchronous Exascale Communication in C++ (ECP'20), Tutorial at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2020, February 6, 2020,

UPC++ is a C++ library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The UPC++ API offers low-overhead one-sided RMA communication and Remote Procedure Calls (RPC), along with futures and promises. These constructs enable the programmer to express dependencies between asynchronous computations and data movement. UPC++ supports the implementation of simple, regular data structures as well as more elaborate distributed data structures where communication is fine-grained, irregular, or both. The library’s support for asynchrony enables the application to aggressively overlap and schedule communication and computation to reduce wait times.

UPC++ is highly portable and runs on platforms from laptops to supercomputers, with native implementations for HPC interconnects. As a C++ library, it interoperates smoothly with existing numerical libraries and on-node programming models (e.g., OpenMP, CUDA).

In this tutorial we will introduce basic concepts and advanced optimization techniques of UPC++. We will discuss the UPC++ memory and execution models and walk through basic algorithm implementations. We will also look at irregular applications and show how they can take advantage of UPC++ features to optimize their performance.

ECP'20 Event page

Amir Kamil, John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Kathy Yelick, UPC++ Tutorial (NERSC Dec 2019), National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), December 16, 2019,

This event was a repeat of the tutorial delivered on November 1, but with the restoration of the hands-on component which was omitted due to uncertainty surrounding the power outage at NERSC.

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. UPC++ provides mechanisms for low-overhead one-sided communication, moving computation to data through remote-procedure calls, and expressing dependencies between asynchronous computations and data movement. It is particularly well-suited for implementing elaborate distributed data structures where communication is irregular or fine-grained. The UPC++ interfaces are designed to be composable and similar to those used in conventional C++. The UPC++ programmer can expect communication to run at close to hardware speeds.

In this tutorial we introduced basic concepts and advanced optimization techniques of UPC++. We discussed the UPC++ memory and execution models and walked through implementing basic algorithms in UPC++. We also discussed irregular applications and how to take advantage of UPC++ features to optimize their performance. The tutorial included hands-on exercises with basic UPC++ constructs. Registrants were given access to run their UPC++ exercises on NERSC’s Cori (currently the #14 fastest computer in the world).

NERSC Dec 2019 Event page

tutorial 2019 12

 

Amir Kamil, John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Rob Egan, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Kathy Yelick, UPC++ Tutorial (NERSC Nov 2019), National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), November 1, 2019,

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. UPC++ provides mechanisms for low-overhead one-sided communication, moving computation to data through remote-procedure calls, and expressing dependencies between asynchronous computations and data movement. It is particularly well-suited for implementing elaborate distributed data structures where communication is irregular or fine-grained. The UPC++ interfaces are designed to be composable and similar to those used in conventional C++. The UPC++ programmer can expect communication to run at close to hardware speeds.

In this tutorial we will introduce basic concepts and advanced optimization techniques of UPC++. We will discuss the UPC++ memory and execution models and walk through implementing basic algorithms in UPC++. We will also look at irregular applications and how to take advantage of UPC++ features to optimize their performance.

NERSC Nov 2019 Event Page

 

Erik Paulson, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, GASNet ofi-conduit, Presentation at the Open Fabrics Interface BoF at Supercomputing 2017, November 2017,

Paul H. Hargrove, UPC Language Full-day Tutorial, Workshop at UC Berkeley, July 12, 2012,

Paul H. Hargrove, UPC Language Half-day Tutorial, Workshop at UC Berkeley, June 15, 2011,

Paul H. Hargrove, Introduction to UPC, CScADS Workshop, July 21, 2010,

Yili Zheng, Filip Blagojevic, Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Costin Iancu, Seung-Jai Min, Katherine Yelick, Getting Multicore Performance with UPC, SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, February 2010,

Rajesh Nishtala, Yili Zheng, Paul H. Hargrove, Katherine Yelick, UPC at Scale, SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, February 25, 2010,

Yili Zheng, Costin Iancu, Paul H. Hargrove, Seung-Jai Min, Katherine Yelick, Extending Unified Parallel C for GPU Computing, SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, February 24, 2010,

Paul H. Hargrove, A Brief Introduction to BLCR (Berkeley Lab Checkpoint/Restart), SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing, February 24, 2010,

Paul Hargrove, Jason Duell, Eric Roman, Berkeley Lab Checkpoint/Restart (BLCR): Status and Future Plans, Dagstuhl Seminar: Fault Tolerance in High-Performance Computing and Grids, May 2009,

Paul Hargrove, Jason Duell, Eric Roman, System-level Checkpoint/Restart with BLCR, TeraGrid 2009 Fault Tolerance Workshop, March 19, 2009,

Paul Hargrove, Jason Duell, Eric Roman, System-level Checkpoint/Restart with BLCR, Los Alamos Computer Science Symposium (LACSS08), October 15, 2008,

Paul Hargrove, Jason Duell, Eric Roman, Advanced Checkpoint Fault Tolerance Solutions for HPC, Workshop on Trends, Technologies and Collaborative Opportunities in High Performance and Grid Computing, Bangkok and Phuket Thailand, June 9, 2008,

Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, Christian Bell, Experiences Implementing Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) Languages on InfiniBand, OpenFabrics Alliance 2008 International Sonoma Workshop, April 2008,

Paul Hargrove, Jason Duell and Eric Roman, An Overview of Berkeley Lab Checkpoint/Restart (BLCR) for Linux Clusters, Presentation to ParLab group at UC Berkeley, March 18, 2008,

Paul Hargrove, Eric Roman, Jason Duell, Job Preemption with BLCR, Urgent Computing Workshop, April 25, 2007,

Dan Bonachea, Rajesh Nishtala, Paul Hargrove, Katherine Yelick, Efficient Point-to-point Synchronization in UPC, 2nd Conf. on Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Models (PGAS06), October 4, 2006,

J. Duell, P. Hargrove, E. Roman, An Overview of Berkeley Lab's Linux Checkpoint/Restart, Presentation at LLNL, January 2004,

Reports

John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Johnny Corbino, Max Grossman, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, Daniel Waters, "UPC++ v1.0 Programmer’s Guide, Revision 2023.9.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report LBNL-2001560, December 2023, doi: 10.25344/S4P01J

UPC++ is a C++ library that supports Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing efficient, scalable parallel programs on distributed-memory parallel computers. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). The UPC++ control model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. The PGAS memory model additionally provides one-sided RMA communication to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ also features Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communication, making it easy to move computation to operate on data that resides on remote processes. UPC++ was designed to support exascale high-performance computing, and the library interfaces and implementation are focused on maximizing scalability. In UPC++, all communication operations are syntactically explicit, which encourages programmers to consider the costs associated with communication and data movement. Moreover, all communication operations are asynchronous by default, encouraging programmers to seek opportunities for overlapping communication latencies with other useful work. UPC++ provides expressive and composable abstractions designed for efficiently managing aggressive use of asynchrony in programs. Together, these design principles are intended to enable programmers to write applications using UPC++ that perform well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Johnny Corbino, Max Grossman, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, Daniel Waters, "UPC++ v1.0 Programmer’s Guide, Revision 2023.3.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 30, 2023, LBNL 2001517, doi: 10.25344/S43591

UPC++ is a C++ library that supports Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing efficient, scalable parallel programs on distributed-memory parallel computers. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). The UPC++ control model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. The PGAS memory model additionally provides one-sided RMA communication to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ also features Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communication, making it easy to move computation to operate on data that resides on remote processes.

UPC++ was designed to support exascale high-performance computing, and the library interfaces and implementation are focused on maximizing scalability. In UPC++, all communication operations are syntactically explicit, which encourages programmers to consider the costs associated with communication and data movement. Moreover, all communication operations are asynchronous by default, encouraging programmers to seek opportunities for overlapping communication latencies with other useful work. UPC++ provides expressive and composable abstractions designed for efficiently managing aggressive use of asynchrony in programs. Together, these design principles are intended to enable programmers to write applications using UPC++ that perform well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Johnny Corbino, Max Grossman, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, Daniel Waters, "UPC++ v1.0 Programmer’s Guide, Revision 2022.9.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 30, 2022, LBNL 2001479, doi: 10.25344/S4QW26

UPC++ is a C++ library that supports Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing efficient, scalable parallel programs on distributed-memory parallel computers. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). The UPC++ control model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. The PGAS memory model additionally provides one-sided RMA communication to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ also features Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communication, making it easy to move computation to operate on data that resides on remote processes.

UPC++ was designed to support exascale high-performance computing, and the library interfaces and implementation are focused on maximizing scalability. In UPC++, all communication operations are syntactically explicit, which encourages programmers to consider the costs associated with communication and data movement. Moreover, all communication operations are asynchronous by default, encouraging programmers to seek opportunities for overlapping communication latencies with other useful work. UPC++ provides expressive and composable abstractions designed for efficiently managing aggressive use of asynchrony in programs. Together, these design principles are intended to enable programmers to write applications using UPC++ that perform well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Max Grossman, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, Daniel Waters, "UPC++ v1.0 Programmer’s Guide, Revision 2022.3.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 2022, LBNL 2001453, doi: 10.25344/S41C7Q


UPC++ is a C++ library that supports Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing efficient, scalable parallel programs on distributed-memory parallel computers. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). The UPC++ control model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. The PGAS memory model additionally provides one-sided RMA communication to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ also features Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communication, making it easy to move computation to operate on data that resides on remote processes.

UPC++ was designed to support exascale high-performance computing, and the library interfaces and implementation are focused on maximizing scalability. In UPC++, all communication operations are syntactically explicit, which encourages programmers to consider the costs associated with communication and data movement. Moreover, all communication operations are asynchronous by default, encouraging programmers to seek opportunities for overlapping communication latencies with other useful work. UPC++ provides expressive and composable abstractions designed for efficiently managing aggressive use of asynchrony in programs. Together, these design principles are intended to enable programmers to write applications using UPC++ that perform well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Max Grossman, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, Daniel Waters, "UPC++ v1.0 Programmer’s Guide, Revision 2021.9.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 2021, LBNL 2001424, doi: 10.25344/S4SW2T


UPC++ is a C++ library that supports Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing efficient, scalable parallel programs on distributed-memory parallel computers. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). The UPC++ control model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. The PGAS memory model additionally provides one-sided RMA communication to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ also features Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communication, making it easy to move computation to operate on data that resides on remote processes.

UPC++ was designed to support exascale high-performance computing, and the library interfaces and implementation are focused on maximizing scalability. In UPC++, all communication operations are syntactically explicit, which encourages programmers to consider the costs associated with communication and data movement. Moreover, all communication operations are asynchronous by default, encouraging programmers to seek opportunities for overlapping communication latencies with other useful work. UPC++ provides expressive and composable abstractions designed for efficiently managing aggressive use of asynchrony in programs. Together, these design principles are intended to enable programmers to write applications using UPC++ that perform well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Max Grossman, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ v1.0 Programmer’s Guide, Revision 2020.10.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, October 2020, LBNL 2001368, doi: 10.25344/S4HG6Q

UPC++ is a C++11 library that provides Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing parallel programs that run efficiently and scale well on distributed-memory parallel computers. The PGAS model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. However, PGAS also provides access to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ provides numerous methods for accessing and using global memory. In UPC++, all operations that access remote memory are explicit, which encourages programmers to be aware of the cost of communication and data movement. Moreover, all remote-memory access operations are by default asynchronous, to enable programmers to write code that scales well even on hundreds of thousands of cores. 

John Bachan, Scott B. Baden, Dan Bonachea, Max Grossman, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ v1.0 Programmer’s Guide, Revision 2020.3.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 2020, LBNL 2001269, doi: 10.25344/S4P88Z

UPC++ is a C++11 library that provides Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing parallel programs that run efficiently and scale well on distributed-memory parallel computers. The PGAS model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. However, PGAS also provides access to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ provides numerous methods for accessing and using global memory. In UPC++, all operations that access remote memory are explicit, which encourages programmers to be aware of the cost of communication and data movement. Moreover, all remote-memory access operations are by default asynchronous, to enable programmers to write code that scales well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ v1.0 Programmer’s Guide, Revision 2019.9.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 2019, LBNL 2001236, doi: 10.25344/S4V30R

UPC++ is a C++11 library that provides Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing parallel programs that run efficiently and scale well on distributed-memory parallel computers. The PGAS model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. However, PGAS also provides access to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ provides numerous methods for accessing and using global memory. In UPC++, all operations that access remote memory are explicit, which encourages programmers to be aware of the cost of communication and data movement. Moreover, all remote-memory access operations are by default asynchronous, to enable programmers to write code that scales well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ v1.0 Specification, Revision 2019.9.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 14, 2019, LBNL 2001237, doi: 10.25344/S4ZW2C

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. We are revising the library under the auspices of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, to meet the needs of applications requiring PGAS support. UPC++ is intended for implementing elaborate distributed data structures where communication is irregular or fine-grained. The UPC++ interfaces for moving non-contiguous data and handling memories with different optimal access methods are composable and similar to those used in conventional C++. The UPC++ programmer can expect communication to run at close to hardware speeds. The key facilities in UPC++ are global pointers, that enable the programmer to express ownership information for improving locality, one-sided communication, both put/get and RPC, futures and continuations. Futures capture data readiness state, which is useful in making scheduling decisions, and continuations provide for completion handling via callbacks. Together, these enable the programmer to chain together a DAG of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies become satisfied.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ Programmer's Guide, v1.0-2019.3.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 2019, LBNL 2001191, doi: 10.25344/S4F301

UPC++ is a C++11 library that provides Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing parallel programs that run efficiently and scale well on distributed-memory parallel computers. The PGAS model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. However, PGAS also provides access to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ provides numerous methods for accessing and using global memory. In UPC++, all operations that access remote memory are explicit, which encourages programmers to be aware of the cost of communication and data movement. Moreover, all remote-memory access operations are by default asynchronous, to enable programmers to write code that scales well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ Specification v1.0, Draft 10", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 15, 2019, LBNL 2001192, doi: 10.25344/S4JS30

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. We are revising the library under the auspices of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, to meet the needs of applications requiring PGAS support. UPC++ is intended for implementing elaborate distributed data structures where communication is irregular or fine-grained. The UPC++ interfaces for moving non-contiguous data and handling memories with different optimal access methods are composable and similar to those used in conventional C++. The UPC++ programmer can expect communication to run at close to hardware speeds. The key facilities in UPC++ are global pointers, that enable the programmer to express ownership information for improving locality, one-sided communication, both put/get and RPC, futures and continuations. Futures capture data readiness state, which is useful in making scheduling decisions, and continuations provide for completion handling via callbacks. Together, these enable the programmer to chain together a DAG of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies become satisfied.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ Programmer's Guide, v1.0-2018.9.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 2018, LBNL 2001180, doi: 10.25344/S49G6V

UPC++ is a C++11 library that provides Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing parallel programs that run efficiently and scale well on distributed-memory parallel computers. The PGAS model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate constituent process having access to local memory as it would in C++. However, PGAS also provides access to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the processes. UPC++ provides numerous methods for accessing and using global memory. In UPC++, all operations that access remote memory are explicit, which encourages programmers to be aware of the cost of communication and data movement. Moreover, all remote-memory access operations are by default asynchronous, to enable programmers to write code that scales well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ Specification v1.0, Draft 8", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 26, 2018, LBNL 2001179, doi: 10.25344/S45P4X

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. We are revising the library under the auspices of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, to meet the needs of applications requiring PGAS support. UPC++ is intended for implementing elaborate distributed data structures where communication is irregular or fine-grained. The UPC++ interfaces for moving non-contiguous data and handling memories with different optimal access methods are composable and similar to those used in conventional C++. The UPC++ programmer can expect communication to run at close to hardware speeds. The key facilities in UPC++ are global pointers, that enable the programmer to express ownership information for improving locality, one-sided communication, both put/get and RPC, futures and continuations. Futures capture data readiness state, which is useful in making scheduling decisions, and continuations provide for completion handling via callbacks. Together, these enable the programmer to chain together a DAG of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies become satisfied.

Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, "GASNet-EX Performance Improvements Due to Specialization for the Cray Aries Network (tech report version)", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 27, 2018, LBNL 2001134, doi: 10.2172/1430690

This document is a deliverable for milestone STPM17-6 of the Exascale Computing Project, delivered by WBS 2.3.1.14. It reports on the improvements in performance observed on Cray XC-series systems due to enhancements made to the GASNet-EX software. These enhancements, known as “specializations”, primarily consist of replacing network-independent implementations of several recently added features with implementations tailored to the Cray Aries network. Performance gains from specialization include (1) Negotiated-Payload Active Messages improve bandwidth of a ping-pong test by up to 14%, (2) Immediate Operations reduce running time of a synthetic benchmark by up to 93%, (3) non-bulk RMA Put bandwidth is increased by up to 32%, (4) Remote Atomic performance is 70% faster than the reference on a point-to-point test and allows a hot-spot test to scale robustly, and (5) non-contiguous RMA interfaces see up to 8.6x speedups for an intra-node benchmark and 26% for inter-node. These improvements are available in the GASNet-EX 2018.3.0 release.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Khaled Ibrahim, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Bryce Lelbach, Brian Van Straalen, "UPC++ Specification v1.0, Draft 6", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 26, 2018, LBNL 2001135, doi: 10.2172/1430689

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. We are revising the library under the auspices of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, to meet the needs of applications requiring PGAS support. UPC++ is intended for implementing elaborate distributed data structures where communication is irregular or fine-grained. The UPC++ interfaces for moving non-contiguous data and handling memories with different optimal access methods are composable and similar to those used in conventional C++. The UPC++ programmer can expect communication to run at close to hardware speeds. The key facilities in UPC++ are global pointers, that enable the programmer to express ownership information for improving locality, one-sided communication, both put/get and RPC, futures and continuations. Futures capture data readiness state, which is useful in making scheduling decisions, and continuations provide for completion handling via callbacks. Together, these enable the programmer to chain together a DAG of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies become satisfied.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Khaled Ibrahim, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian Van Straalen, "UPC++ Programmer’s Guide, v1.0-2018.3.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 2018, LBNL 2001136, doi: 10.2172/1430693

UPC++ is a C++11 library that provides Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. It is designed for writing parallel programs that run efficiently and scale well on distributed-memory parallel computers. The PGAS model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate thread of execution (referred to as a rank, a term borrowed from MPI) having access to local memory as it would in C++. However, PGAS also provides access to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the ranks. UPC++ provides numerous methods for accessing and using global memory. In UPC++, all operations that access remote memory are explicit, which encourages programmers to be aware of the cost of communication and data movement. Moreover, all remote-memory access operations are by default asynchronous, to enable programmers to write code that scales well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Khaled Ibrahim, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ Programmer’s Guide, v1.0-2017.9", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 2017, LBNL 2001065, doi: 10.2172/1398522

UPC++ is a C++11 library that provides Asynchronous Partitioned Global Address Space (APGAS) programming. It is designed for writing parallel programs that run efficiently and scale well on distributed-memory parallel computers. The APGAS model is single program, multiple-data (SPMD), with each separate thread of execution (referred to as a rank, a term borrowed from MPI) having access to local memory as it would in C++. However, APGAS also provides access to a global address space, which is allocated in shared segments that are distributed over the ranks. UPC++ provides numerous methods for accessing and using global memory. In UPC++, all operations that access remote memory are explicit, which encourages programmers to be aware of the cost of communication and data movement. Moreover, all remote-memory access operations are by default asynchronous, to enable programmers to write code that scales well even on hundreds of thousands of cores.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Khaled Ibrahim, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Bryce Lelbach, Brian Van Straalen, "UPC++ Specification v1.0, Draft 4", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 27, 2017, LBNL 2001066, doi: 10.2172/1398521

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Asynchronous Partitioned Global Address Space (APGAS) programming. We are revising the library under the auspices of the DOE’s Exascale Computing Project, to meet the needs of applications requiring PGAS support. UPC++ is intended for implementing elaborate distributed data structures where communication is irregular or fine-grained. The UPC++ interfaces for moving non-contiguous data and handling memories with different optimal access methods are composable and similar to those used in conventional C++. The UPC++ programmer can expect communication to run at close to hardware speeds. The key facilities in UPC++ are global pointers, that enable the programmer to express ownership information for improving locality, one-sided communication, both put/get and RPC, futures and continuations. Futures capture data readiness state, which is useful in making scheduling decisions, and continuations provide for completion handling via callbacks. Together, these enable the programmer to chain together a DAG of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies become satisfied.

Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, "GASNet Specification, v1.8.1", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, August 31, 2017, LBNL 2001064, doi: 10.2172/1398512

GASNet is a language-independent, low-level networking layer that provides network-independent, high-performance communication primitives tailored for implementing parallel global address space SPMD languages and libraries such as UPC, UPC++, Co-Array Fortran, Legion, Chapel, and many others. The interface is primarily intended as a compilation target and for use by runtime library writers (as opposed to end users), and the primary goals are high performance, interface portability, and expressiveness. GASNet stands for "Global-Address Space Networking".

Xuehai Qian, Koushik Sen, Paul Hargrove, Costin Iancu, "OPR: Partial Deterministic Record and Replay for One-Sided Communication", LBNL TR, April 17, 2015,

UPC Consortium, "UPC Language and Library Specifications, Version 1.3", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Technical Report, November 16, 2013, LBNL 6623E, doi: 10.2172/1134233

UPC is an explicitly parallel extension to the ISO C 99 Standard. UPC follows the partitioned global address space programming model. This document is the formal specification for the UPC language and library syntax and semantics, and supersedes prior specification version 1.2 (LBNL-59208).

W. Kramer, J. Carter, D. Skinner, L. Oliker, P. Husbands, P. Hargrove, J. Shalf, O. Marques, E. Ng, A. Drummond, K. Yelick, "Software Roadmap to Plug and Play Petaflop/s", 2006,

UPC Consortium, "UPC Language Specifications, v1.2", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Technical Report, May 31, 2005, LBNL 59208, doi: 10.2172/862127

UPC is an explicitly parallel extension to the ISO C 99 Standard. UPC follows the partitioned global address space programming model. This document is the formal specification for the UPC language syntax and semantics.

J. Duell, P. Hargrove, E. Roman, "The Design and Implementation of Berkeley Lab's Linux Checkpoint/Restart", LBNL Technical Report, December 2002, LBNL 54941,

J. Duell, P. Hargrove, E. Roman, "Requirements for Linux Checkpoint/Restart", LBNL Technical Report, May 2002, LBNL 49659,

Web Articles

"Berkeley Lab’s Networking Middleware GASNet Turns 20: Now, GASNet-EX is Gearing Up for the Exascale Era", Linda Vu, HPCWire (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory CS Area Communications), December 7, 2022, doi: 10.25344/S4BP4G

GASNet Celebrates 20th Anniversary


For 20 years, Berkeley Lab’s GASNet has been fueling developers’ ability to tap the power of massively parallel supercomputers more effectively. The middleware was recently upgraded to support exascale scientific applications.

"Code controls communication to boost computer performance", Katherine Yelick, Paul Hargrove, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory CS Area Communications, August 27, 2009,

The Berkeley UPC compiler, backed by the GASNet communication system, are both developed at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley and provide computational scientists with a portable HPC programming model focused on high-performance one-sided communication.

Posters

Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, Johnny Corbino, Amir Kamil, Colin A. MacLean, Damian Rouson, Daniel Waters, "UPC++ and GASNet: PGAS Support for Exascale Apps and Runtimes (ECP'23)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2023, January 2023,

The Pagoda project is developing a programming system to support HPC application development using the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model. The first component is GASNet-EX, a portable, high-performance, global-address-space communication library. The second component is UPC++, a C++ template library. Together, these libraries enable agile, lightweight communication such as arises in irregular applications, libraries and frameworks running on exascale systems.

GASNet-EX is a portable, high-performance communications middleware library which leverages hardware support to implement Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Active Message communication primitives. GASNet-EX supports a broad ecosystem of alternative HPC programming models, including UPC++, Legion, Chapel and multiple implementations of UPC and Fortran Coarrays. GASNet-EX is implemented directly over the native APIs for networks of interest in HPC. The tight semantic match of GASNet-EX APIs to the client requirements and hardware capabilities often yields better performance than competing libraries.

UPC++ provides high-level productivity abstractions appropriate for Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming such as: remote memory access (RMA), remote procedure call (RPC), support for accelerators (e.g. GPUs), and mechanisms for aggressive asynchrony to hide communication costs. UPC++ implements communication using GASNet-EX, delivering high performance and portability from laptops to exascale supercomputers. HPC application software using UPC++ includes: MetaHipMer2 metagenome assembler, SIMCoV viral propagation simulation, NWChemEx TAMM, and graph computation kernels from ExaGraph.

Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, Amir Kamil, Colin A. MacLean, Damian Rouson, Daniel Waters, "UPC++ and GASNet: PGAS Support for Exascale Apps and Runtimes (ECP'22)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2022, May 5, 2022,

We present UPC++ and GASNet-EX, distributed libraries which together enable one-sided, lightweight communication such as arises in irregular applications, libraries and frameworks running on exascale systems.

UPC++ is a C++ PGAS library, featuring APIs for Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and for Remote Memory Access (RMA) to host and GPU memories.  The combination of these two features yields performant, scalable solutions to problems of interest within ECP.

GASNet-EX is PGAS communication middleware, providing the foundation for UPC++ and Legion, plus numerous non-ECP clients.  GASNet-EX RMA interfaces match or exceed the performance of MPI-RMA across a variety of pre-exascale systems.

 

Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, Colin A. MacLean, Daniel Waters, "GASNet-EX Memory Kinds: Support for Device Memory in PGAS Programming Models", The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC'21) Research Poster, November 2021, doi: 10.25344/S4P306

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is developing a programming system to support HPC application development using the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model. This work includes two major components: UPC++ (a C++ template library) and GASNet-EX (a portable, high-performance communication library). This poster describes recent advances in GASNet-EX to efficiently implement Remote Memory Access (RMA) operations to and from memory on accelerator devices such as GPUs. Performance is illustrated via benchmark results from UPC++ and the Legion programming system, both using GASNet-EX as their communications library.

Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, Max Grossman, Amir Kamil, Colin A. MacLean, Daniel Waters, "UPC++ and GASNet: PGAS Support for Exascale Apps and Runtimes (ECP'21)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2021, April 2021,

We present UPC++ and GASNet-EX, which together enable one-sided, lightweight communication such as arises in irregular applications, libraries and frameworks running on exascale systems.

UPC++ is a C++ PGAS library, featuring APIs for Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC).  The combination of these two features yields performant, scalable solutions to problems of interest within ECP.

GASNet-EX is PGAS communication middleware, providing the foundation for UPC++ and Legion, plus numerous non-ECP clients.  GASNet-EX RMA interfaces match or exceed the performance of MPI-RMA across a variety of pre-exascale systems

Amir Kamil, John Bachan, Dan Bonachea, Paul H. Hargrove, Erich Strohmaier and Daniel Waters, "UPC++: Asynchronous RMA and RPC Communication for Exascale Applications (ECP'20)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2020, February 2020,

Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, "GASNet-EX: RMA and Active Message Communication for Exascale Programming Models (ECP'20)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2020, February 2020,

Scott B. Baden, Paul H. Hargrove, Hadia Ahmed, John Bachan, Dan Bonachea, Steve Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "Pagoda: Lightweight Communications and Global Address Space Support for Exascale Applications - UPC++ (ECP'19)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2019, January 2019,

Scott B. Baden, Paul H. Hargrove, Dan Bonachea, "Pagoda: Lightweight Communications and Global Address Space Support for Exascale Applications - GASNet-EX (ECP'19)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2019, January 2019,

Scott B. Baden, Paul H. Hargrove, Hadia Ahmed, John Bachan, Dan Bonachea, Steve Hofmeyr, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ and GASNet-EX: PGAS Support for Exascale Applications and Runtimes", The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC'18) Research Poster, November 2018,

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is developing a programming system to support HPC application development using the Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) model. This work is driven by the emerging need for adaptive, lightweight communication in irregular applications at exascale. We present an overview of UPC++ and GASNet-EX, including examples and performance results.

GASNet-EX is a portable, high-performance communication library, leveraging hardware support to efficiently implement Active Messages and Remote Memory Access (RMA). UPC++ provides higher-level abstractions appropriate for PGAS programming such as: one-sided communication (RMA), remote procedure call, locality-aware APIs for user-defined distributed objects, and robust support for asynchronous execution to hide latency. Both libraries have been redesigned relative to their predecessors to meet the needs of exascale computing. While both libraries continue to evolve, the system already demonstrates improvements in microbenchmarks and application proxies.

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Khaled Ibrahim, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ and GASNet: PGAS Support for Exascale Apps and Runtimes (ECP'18)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2018, February 2018,

Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, "GASNet-EX: PGAS Support for Exascale Apps and Runtimes (ECP'18)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2018, February 2018,

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Khaled Ibrahim, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian Van Straalen, "UPC++: a PGAS C++ Library", The International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC'17) Research Poster, November 2017,

John Bachan, Scott Baden, Dan Bonachea, Paul Hargrove, Steven Hofmeyr, Khaled Ibrahim, Mathias Jacquelin, Amir Kamil, Brian van Straalen, "UPC++ and GASNet: PGAS Support for Exascale Apps and Runtimes (ECP'17)", Poster at Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Annual Meeting 2017, January 2, 2017,

Dan Bonachea, Rajesh Nishtala, Paul Hargrove, Mike Welcome, Kathy Yelick,, "Optimized Collectives for PGAS Languages with One-Sided Communication", ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC'06) Poster Session, November 2006, doi: 10.1145/1188455.1188604

Optimized collective operations are a crucial performance factor for many scientific applications. This work investigates the design and optimization of collectives in the context of Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages such as Unified Parallel C (UPC). Languages with one-sided communication permit a more flexible and expressive collective interface with application code, in turn enabling more aggressive optimization and more effective utilization of system resources. We investigate the design tradeoffs in a collectives implementation for UPC, ranging from resource management to synchronization mechanisms and target-dependent selection of optimal communication patterns. Our collectives are implemented in the Berkeley UPC compiler using the GASNet communication system, tuned across a wide variety of supercomputing platforms, and benchmarked against MPI collectives. Special emphasis is placed on the newly added Cray XT3 backend for UPC, whose characteristics are benchmarked in detail.

Dan O Bonachea, Christian Bell, Rajesh Nishtala, Kaushik Datta, Parry Husbands, Paul Hargrove, Katherine Yelick, "The Performance and Productivity Benefits of Global Address Space Languages", ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC'05) Poster Session, November 2005,

Christian Bell, Dan Bonachea, Wei Chen, Jason Duell, Paul Hargrove, Parry Husbands, Costin Iancu, Wei Tu, Mike Welcome, Kathy Yelick, "GASNet 2 - An Alternative High-Performance Communication Interface", ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC'04) Poster Session, November 2004,

Christian Bell, Dan Bonachea, Wei Chen, Jason Duell, Paul Hargrove, Parry Husbands, Costin Iancu, Mike Welcome, Kathy Yelick, "GASNet: Project Overview (SC'03)", ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC'03) Poster Session, November 2003,

Christian Bell, Dan Bonachea, Wei Chen, Jason Duell, Paul Hargrove, Parry Husbands, Costin Iancu, Mike Welcome, Kathy Yelick, "GASNet: Project Overview (SC'02)", ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing (SC'02) Poster Session, November 2002,

Others

Paul Hargrove, Brock Palen, Jeff Squyres, RCE 12: BLCR, RCE Podcast (interview), June 19, 2009,

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Paul Hargrove of the Berkeley Laboratory Checkpoint Restart (BLCR) project

RCE Podcast 12 (MP3)