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

Amir Kamil

akamil2
Amir Kamil
Visiting Faculty
Computer Science Department
Eastern Time
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Amir Kamil is a Visiting Faculty member of the Computer Languages and Systems Software group. He is also a Lecturer in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. His research interests include compiler analysis, optimization, and programming models for high-performance computing. He has contributed to the Titanium programming language and has been one of the developers of the UPC++ PGAS library for high-performance computing in C++. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2012.

Publication Lists:

Journal Articles

Katherine Yelick, Paul Hilfinger, Susan Graham, Dan Bonachea, Jimmy Su, Amir Kamil, Kaushik Datta, Phillip Colella, Tong Wen, "Parallel Languages and Compilers: Perspective from the Titanium Experience", International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (IJHPCA), August 1, 2007, 21(3):266--290, doi: 10.1177/1094342007078449

We describe the rationale behind the design of key features of Titanium — an explicitly parallel dialect of JavaTM for high-performance scientific programming — and our experiences in building applications with the language. Specifically, we address Titanium’s Partitioned Global Address Space model, SPMD parallelism support, multi-dimensional arrays and array-index calculus, memory management, immutable classes (class-like types that are value types rather than reference types), operator overloading, and generic programming. We provide an overview of the Titanium compiler implementation, covering various parallel analyses and optimizations, Titanium runtime technology and the GASNet network communication layer. We summarize results and lessons learned from implementing the NAS parallel benchmarks, elliptic and hyperbolic solvers using Adaptive Mesh Refinement, and several applications of the Immersed Boundary method. 

Conference Papers

Amir Kamil, Dan Bonachea, "Optimization of Asynchronous Communication Operations through Eager Notifications", Parallel Applications Workshop, Alternatives To MPI+X (PAW-ATM), November 2021, doi: 10.25344/S42C71


UPC++ is a C++ library implementing the Asynchronous Partitioned Global Address Space (APGAS) model. We propose an enhancement to the completion mechanisms of UPC++ used to synchronize communication operations that is designed to reduce overhead for on-node operations. Our enhancement permits eager delivery of completion notification in cases where the data transfer semantics of an operation happen to complete synchronously, for example due to the use of shared-memory bypass. This semantic relaxation allows removing significant overhead from the critical path of the implementation in such cases. We evaluate our results on three different representative systems using a combination of microbenchmarks and five variations of the the HPCChallenge RandomAccess benchmark implemented in UPC++ and run on a single node to accentuate the impact of locality. We find that in RMA versions of the benchmark written in a straightforward manner (without manually optimizing for locality), the new eager notification mode can provide up to a 25% speedup when synchronizing with promises and up to a 13.5x speedup when synchronizing with conjoined futures. We also evaluate our results using a graph matching application written with UPC++ RMA communication, where we measure overall speedups of as much as 11% in single-node runs of the unmodified application code, due to our transparent enhancements.

PAW-ATM'21

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.

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.

Hongzhang Shan, Samuel Williams, Yili Zheng, Amir Kamil, Katherine Yelick,, "Implementing High-Performance Geometric Multigrid Solver with Naturally Grained Messages", 9th International Conference on Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Models (PGAS), September 2015, 38--46, doi: 10.1109/PGAS.2015.12

Hongzhang Shan, Amir Kamil, Samuel Williams, Yili Zheng, Katherine Yelick, "Evaluation of PGAS Communication Paradigms with Geometric Multigrid", Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Partitioned Global Address Space Programming Models (PGAS), October 2014, doi: 10.1145/2676870.2676874

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages and one-sided communication enable application developers to select the communication paradigm that balances the performance needs of applications with the productivity desires of programmers. In this paper, we evaluate three different one-sided communication paradigms in the context of geometric multigrid using the miniGMG benchmark. Although miniGMG's static, regular, and predictable communication does not exploit the ultimate potential of PGAS models, multigrid solvers appear in many contemporary applications and represent one of the most important communication patterns. We use UPC++, a PGAS extension of C++, as the vehicle for our evaluation, though our work is applicable to any of the existing PGAS languages and models. We compare performance with the highly tuned MPI baseline, and the results indicate that the most promising approach towards achieving performance and ease of programming is to use high-level abstractions, such as the multidimensional arrays provided by UPC++, that hide data aggregation and messaging in the runtime library.

Amir Kamil, Yili Zheng, Katherine Yelick, "A Local-View Array Library for Partitioned Global Address Space C++ Programs", ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Libraries, Languages, and Compilers for Array Programming (ARRAY), June 2014,

Multidimensional arrays are an important data structure in many scientific applications. Unfortunately, built-in support for such arrays is inadequate in C++, particularly in the distributed setting where bulk communication operations are required for good performance. In this paper, we present a multidimensional library for partitioned global address space (PGAS) programs, supporting the one-sided remote access and bulk operations of the PGAS model. The library is based on Titanium arrays, which have proven to provide good productivity and performance. These arrays provide a local view of data, where each rank constructs its own portion of a global data structure, matching the local view of execution common to PGAS programs and providing maximum flexibility in structuring global data. Unlike Titanium, which has its own compiler with array-specific analyses, optimizations, and code generation, we implement multidimensional arrays solely through a C++ library. The main goal of this effort is to provide a library-based implementation that can match the productivity and performance of a compiler-based approach. We implement the array library as an extension to UPC++, a C++ library for PGAS programs, and we extend Titanium arrays with specializations to improve performance. We evaluate the array library by porting four Titanium benchmarks to UPC++, demonstrating that it can achieve up to 25% better performance than Titanium without a significant increase in programmer effort.
Multidimensional arrays are an important data structure in many scientific applications. Unfortunately, built-in support for such arrays is inadequate in C++, particularly in the distributed setting where bulk communication operations are required for good performance. In this paper, we present a multidimensional library for partitioned global address space (PGAS) programs, supporting the one-sided remote access and bulk operations of the PGAS model. The library is based on Titanium arrays, which have proven to provide good productivity and performance. These arrays provide a local view of data, where each rank constructs its own portion of a global data structure, matching the local view of execution common to PGAS programs and providing maximum flexibility in structuring global data. Unlike Titanium, which has its own compiler with array-specific analyses, optimizations, and code generation, we implement multidimensional arrays solely through a C++ library. The main goal of this effort is to provide a library-based implementation that can match the productivity and performance of a compiler-based approach. We implement the array library as an extension to UPC++, a C++ library for PGAS programs, and we extend Titanium arrays with specializations to improve performance. We evaluate the array library by porting four Titanium benchmarks to UPC++, demonstrating that it can achieve up to 25% better performance than Titanium without a significant increase in programmer effort.
Multidimensional arrays are an important data structure in many scientific applications. Unfortunately, built-in support for such arrays is inadequate in C++, particularly in the distributed setting where bulk communication operations are required for good performance. In this paper, we present a multidimensional library for partitioned global address space (PGAS) programs, supporting the one-sided remote access and bulk operations of the PGAS model. The library is based on Titanium arrays, which have proven to provide good productivity and performance. These arrays provide a local view of data, where each rank constructs its own portion of a global data structure, matching the local view of execution common to PGAS programs and providing maximum flexibility in structuring global data. Unlike Titanium, which has its own compiler with array-specific analyses, optimizations, and code generation, we implement multidimensional arrays solely through a C++ library. The main goal of this effort is to provide a library-based implementation that can match the productivity and performance of a compiler-based approach. We implement the array library as an extension to UPC++, a C++ library for PGAS programs, and we extend Titanium arrays with specializations to improve performance. We evaluate the array library by porting four Titanium benchmarks to UPC++, demonstrating that it can achieve up to 25% better performance than Titanium without a significant increase in programmer effort.
Multidimensional arrays are an important data structure in many scientific applications. Unfortunately, built-in support for such arrays is inadequate in C++, particularly in the distributed setting where bulk communication operations are required for good performance. In this paper, we present a multidimensional library for partitioned global address space (PGAS) programs, supporting the one-sided remote access and bulk operations of the PGAS model. The library is based on Titanium arrays, which have proven to provide good productivity and performance. These arrays provide a local view of data, where each rank constructs its own portion of a global data structure, matching the local view of execution common to PGAS programs and providing maximum flexibility in structuring global data. Unlike Titanium, which has its own compiler with array-specific analyses, optimizations, and code generation, we implement multidimensional arrays solely through a C++ library. The main goal of this effort is to provide a library-based implementation that can match the productivity and performance of a compiler-based approach. We implement the array library as an extension to UPC++, a C++ library for PGAS programs, and we extend Titanium arrays with specializations to improve performance. We evaluate the array library by porting four Titanium benchmarks to UPC++, demonstrating that it can achieve up to 25% better performance than Titanium without a significant increase in programmer effort.
Multidimensional arrays are an important data structure in many scientific applications. Unfortunately, built-in support for such arrays is inadequate in C++, particularly in the distributed setting where bulk communication operations are required for good performance. In this paper, we present a multidimensional library for partitioned global address space (PGAS) programs, supporting the one-sided remote access and bulk operations of the PGAS model. The library is based on Titanium arrays, which have proven to provide good productivity and performance. These arrays provide a local view of data, where each rank constructs its own portion of a global data structure, matching the local view of execution common to PGAS programs and providing maximum flexibility in structuring global data. Unlike Titanium, which has its own compiler with array-specific analyses, optimizations, and code generation, we implement multidimensional arrays solely through a C++ library. The main goal of this effort is to provide a library-based implementation that can match the productivity and performance of a compiler-based approach. We implement the array library as an extension to UPC++, a C++ library for PGAS programs, and we extend Titanium arrays with specializations to improve performance. We evaluate the array library by porting four Titanium benchmarks to UPC++, demonstrating that it can achieve up to 25% better performance than Titanium without a significant increase in programmer effort.

Multidimensional arrays are an important data structure in many scientific applications. Unfortunately, built-in support for such arrays is inadequate in C++, particularly in the distributed setting where bulk communication operations are required for good performance. In this paper, we present a multidimensional library for partitioned global address space (PGAS) programs, supporting the one-sided remote access and bulk operations of the PGAS model. The library is based on Titanium arrays, which have proven to provide good productivity and performance. These arrays provide a local view of data, where each rank constructs its own portion of a global data structure, matching the local view of execution common to PGAS programs and providing maximum flexibility in structuring global data. Unlike Titanium, which has its own compiler with array-specific analyses, optimizations, and code generation, we implement multidimensional arrays solely through a C++ library. The main goal of this effort is to provide a library-based implementation that can match the productivity and performance of a compiler-based approach. We implement the array library as an extension to UPC++, a C++ library for PGAS programs, and we extend Titanium arrays with specializations to improve performance. We evaluate the array library by porting four Titanium benchmarks to UPC++, demonstrating that it can achieve up to 25% better performance than Titanium without a significant increase in programmer effort.

Multidimensional arrays are an important data structure in many scientific applications. Unfortunately, built-in support for such arrays is inadequate in C++, particularly in the distributed setting where bulk communication operations are required for good performance. In this paper, we present a multidimensional library for partitioned global address space (PGAS) programs, supporting the one-sided remote access and bulk operations of the PGAS model. The library is based on Titanium arrays, which have proven to provide good productivity and performance. These arrays provide a local view of data, where each rank constructs its own portion of a global data structure, matching the local view of execution common to PGAS programs and providing maximum flexibility in structuring global data. Unlike Titanium, which has its own compiler with array-specific analyses, optimizations, and code generation, we implement multidimensional arrays solely through a C++ library. The main goal of this effort is to provide a library-based implementation that can match the productivity and performance of a compiler-based approach. We implement the array library as an extension to UPC++, a C++ library for PGAS programs, and we extend Titanium arrays with specializations to improve performance. We evaluate the array library by porting four Titanium benchmarks to UPC++, demonstrating that it can achieve up to 25% better performance than Titanium without a significant increase in programmer effort.Multidimensional arrays are an important data structure in many scientific applications. Unfortunately, built-in support for such arrays is inadequate in C++, particularly in the distributed setting where bulk communication operations are required for good performance. In this paper, we present a multidimensional library for partitioned global address space (PGAS) programs, supporting the one-sided remote access and bulk operations of the PGAS model. The library is based on Titanium arrays, which have proven to provide good productivity and performance. These arrays provide a local view of data, where each rank constructs its own portion of a global data structure, matching the local view of execution common to PGAS programs and providing maximum flexibility in structuring global data. Unlike Titanium, which has its own compiler with array-specific analyses, optimizations, and code generation, we implement multidimensional arrays solely through a C++ library. The main goal of this effort is to provide a library-based implementation that can match the productivity and performance of a compiler-based approach. We implement the array library as an extension to UPC++, a C++ library for PGAS programs, and we extend Titanium arrays with specializations to improve performance. We evaluate the array library by porting four Titanium benchmarks to UPC++, demonstrating that it can achieve up to 25% better performance than Titanium without a significant increase in programmer effort.

Yili Zheng, Amir Kamil, Michael B. Driscoll, Hongzhang Shan, Katherine Yelick, "UPC++: A PGAS extension for C++", International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), May 19, 2014, 1105--1114, doi: 10.1109/IPDPS.2014.115

Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) languages are convenient for expressing algorithms with large, random-access data, and they have proven to provide high performance and scalability through lightweight one-sided communication and locality control. While very convenient for moving data around the system, PGAS languages have taken different views on the model of computation, with the static Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) model providing the best scalability. In this paper we present UPC++, a PGAS extension for C++ that has three main objectives: 1) to provide an object-oriented PGAS programming model in the context of the popular C++ language, 2) to add useful parallel programming idioms unavailable in UPC, such as asynchronous remote function invocation and multidimensional arrays, to support complex scientific applications, 3) to offer an easy on-ramp to PGAS programming through interoperability with other existing parallel programming systems (e.g., MPI, OpenMP, CUDA). We implement UPC++ with a "compiler-free" approach using C++ templates and runtime libraries. We borrow heavily from previous PGAS languages and describe the design decisions that led to this particular set of language features, providing significantly more expressiveness than UPC with very similar performance characteristics. We evaluate the programmability and performance of UPC++ using five benchmarks on two representative supercomputers, demonstrating that UPC++ can deliver excellent performance at large scale up to 32K cores while offering PGAS productivity features to C++ applications.

A Kamil, K Yelick, "Hierarchical computation in the SPMD programming model", Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), January 2014, 8664:3--19, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-09967-5_1

Large-scale parallel machines are programmed mainly with the single program, multiple data (SPMD) model of parallelism. While this model has advantages of scalability and simplicity, it does not fit well with divide-and-conquer parallelism or hierarchical machines that mix shared and distributed memory. In this paper, we define the recursive single program, multiple data model (RSPMD) that extends SPMD with a hierarchical team mechanism to support hierarchical algorithms and machines. We implement this model in the Titanium language and describe how to eliminate a class of deadlocks by ensuring alignment of collective operations. We present application case studies evaluating the RSPMD model, showing that it enables divide-and-conquer algorithms such as sorting to be elegantly expressed and that team collective operations increase performance of conjugate gradient by up to a factor of two. The model also facilitates optimizations for hierarchical machines, improving scalability of particle in cell by 8x and performance of sorting and a stencil code by up to 40% and 14%, respectively. 

A Kamil, K Yelick, "Enforcing textual alignment of collectives using dynamic checks", Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), January 2010, 5898 LNC:368--382, doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-13374-9_25

Many parallel programs are written in a single-program, multiple data (SPMD) style, in which synchronization is provided using collective operations that all threads execute simultaneously. If these operations are not properly aligned on all threads, deadlock can occur, and many compiler analyses and optimizations that depend on proper alignment fail. In this paper, we discuss the flaws in the Titanium language’s type system for enforcing textual alignment of collectives. We then present a system that uses runtime checks to ensure alignment for two definitions of textual alignment. The system instruments the code to keep track of alignment in each thread and then checks that alignment matches prior to performing a collective operation. We have implemented the system in the Titanium compiler, verifying that it catches alignment errors. We tested its performance on multiple application programs, demonstrating that the checks have no appreciable impact on execution time.

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.

A Kamil, K Yelick, "Hierarchical pointer analysis for distributed programs", Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), January 2007, 4634 LNC:281--297, doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-74061-2_18

We present a new pointer analysis for use in shared memory programs running on hierarchical parallel machines. The analysis is motivated by the partitioned global address space languages, in which programmers have control over data layout and threads and can directly read and write to memory associated with other threads. Titanium, UPC, Co-Array Fortran, X10, Chapel, and Fortress are all examples of such languages. The novelty of our analysis comes from the hierarchical machine model used, which captures the increasingly hierarchical nature of modern parallel machines. For example, the analysis can distinguish between pointers that can reference values within a thread, within a shared memory multiprocessor, or within a network of processors. The analysis is presented with a formal type system and operational semantics, articulating the various ways in which pointers can be used within a hierarchical machine model. The hierarchical analysis has several applications, including race detection, sequential consistency enforcement, and software caching. We present results of an implementation of the analysis, applying it to data race detection, and show that the hierarchical analysis is very effective at reducing the number of false races detected.

A Kamil, K Yelick, "Concurrency analysis for parallel programs with textually aligned barriers", Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), January 2006, 4339 LNC:185--199, doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-69330-7_13

A fundamental problem in the analysis of parallel programs is to de- termine when two statements in a program may run concurrently. This analysis is the parallel analog to control flow analysis on serial programs and is useful in detecting parallel programming errors and as a precursor to semantics-preserving code transformations. We consider the problem of analyzing parallel programs that access shared memory and use barrier synchronization, specifically those with textually aligned barriers and single-valued expressions. We present an intermediate graph representation for parallel programs and an efficient interprocedural analysis algorithm that conservatively computes the set of all concurrent statements. We improve the precision of this algorithm by using context-free language reachability to ignore infeasible program paths. We then apply the algorithms to static race detection and show that it can benefit from the concurrency information provided. 

A Kamil, J Su, K Yelick, "Making sequential consistency practical in titanium", Proceedings of the International Conference on Supercomputing, January 2005, 2005-Nov, doi: 10.1109/SC.2005.43

The memory consistency model in shared memory parallel programming controls the order in which memory operations performed by one thread may be observed by another. The most natural model for programmers is to have memory accesses appear to take effect in the order specified in the original program. Language designers have been reluctant to use this strong semantics, called sequential consistency, due to concerns over the performance of memory fence instructions and related mechanisms that guarantee order. In this paper, we provide evidence for the practicality of sequential consistency by showing that advanced compiler analysis techniques are sufficient to eliminate the need for most memory fences and enable high-level optimizations. Our analyses eliminated over 97% of the memory fences that were needed by a naive implementation, accounting for 87 to 100% of the dynamically encountered fences in all but one benchmark. The impact of the memory model and analysis on runtime performance depends on the quality of the optimizations: more aggressive optimizations are likely to be invalidated by a strong memory consistency semantics. We consider two specific optimizations pipelining of bulk memory copies and communication aggregation and scheduling for irregular accesses and show that our most aggressive analysis is able to obtain the same performance as the relaxed model when applied to two linear algebra kernels. While additional work on parallel optimizations and analyses is needed, we believe these results provide important evidence on the viability of using a simple memory consistency model without sacrificing performance.

Book Chapters

Katherine Yelick, Susan Graham, Paul Hilfinger, Dan Bonachea, Jimmy Su, Amir Kamil, Kaushik Datta, Phillip Colella, Tong Wen, "Titanium", Encyclopedia of Parallel Computing, edited by David Padua, (Springer US: 2011) Pages: 2049--2055 doi: 10.1007/978-0-387-09766-4_516

Titanium is a parallel programming language designed for high-performance scientific computing. It is based on Java and uses a Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) parallelism model with a Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS).

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:

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.

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

 

Amir Kamil, Managing Hierarchy with Teams in the SPMD Programming Model, Workshop on Programming Abstractions for Data Locality (PADAL'14), April 28, 2014,

The single program, multiple data (SPMD) model of parallelism is the dominant programming model for large-scale distributed-memory machines. Its simple structure maps well to such machines: it exposes the actual degree of available parallelism, leads to good locality, and can be implemented by efficient runtime systems. However, its simplicity also makes it difficult to manage hierarchy, both at the algorithmic level (e.g. divide-and-conquer algorithms) and in addressing the communication characteristics of hierarchical machines. In this talk, we present a hierarchical team mechanism that allows SPMD programs to manage hierarchy. We show that it allows divide-and-conquer algorithms such as sorting to be expressed in SPMD and that it enables optimizations for hierarchical machines, increasing the scalability and/or performance of multiple benchmarks. We also explore how hierarchical teams may prove useful in other programming abstractions, such as expressing hierarchical distribution of data.

Reports

Dan Bonachea, Amir Kamil, "UPC++ v1.0 Specification, Revision 2023.9.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report LBNL-2001561, December 2023, doi: 10.25344/S4J592

UPC++ is a C++ library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). All communication operations are syntactically explicit and default to non-blocking; asynchrony is managed through the use of futures, promises and continuation callbacks, enabling the programmer to construct a graph of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies are satisfied. A global pointer abstraction provides system-wide addressability of shared memory, including host and accelerator memories. The parallelism model is primarily process-based, but the interface is thread-safe and designed to allow efficient and expressive use in multi-threaded applications. The interface is designed for extreme scalability throughout, and deliberately avoids design features that could inhibit scalability.

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.

Dan Bonachea, Amir Kamil, "UPC++ v1.0 Specification, Revision 2023.3.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 31, 2023, LBNL 2001516, doi: 10.25344/S46W2J


UPC++ is a C++ library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). All communication operations are syntactically explicit and default to non-blocking; asynchrony is managed through the use of futures, promises and continuation callbacks, enabling the programmer to construct a graph of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies are satisfied. A global pointer abstraction provides system-wide addressability of shared memory, including host and accelerator memories. The parallelism model is primarily process-based, but the interface is thread-safe and designed to allow efficient and expressive use in multi-threaded applications. The interface is designed for extreme scalability throughout, and deliberately avoids design features that could inhibit scalability.

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.

Dan Bonachea, Amir Kamil, "UPC++ v1.0 Specification, Revision 2022.9.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 30, 2022, LBNL 2001480, doi: 10.25344/S4M59P


UPC++ is a C++ library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). All communication operations are syntactically explicit and default to non-blocking; asynchrony is managed through the use of futures, promises and continuation callbacks, enabling the programmer to construct a graph of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies are satisfied. A global pointer abstraction provides system-wide addressability of shared memory, including host and accelerator memories. The parallelism model is primarily process-based, but the interface is thread-safe and designed to allow efficient and expressive use in multi-threaded applications. The interface is designed for extreme scalability throughout, and deliberately avoids design features that could inhibit scalability.

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.

Dan Bonachea, Amir Kamil, "UPC++ v1.0 Specification, Revision 2022.3.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 2022, LBNL 2001452, doi: 10.25344/S4530J


UPC++ is a C++ library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). All communication operations are syntactically explicit and default to non-blocking; asynchrony is managed through the use of futures, promises and continuation callbacks, enabling the programmer to construct a graph of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies are satisfied. A global pointer abstraction provides system-wide addressability of shared memory, including host and accelerator memories. The parallelism model is primarily process-based, but the interface is thread-safe and designed to allow efficient and expressive use in multi-threaded applications. The interface is designed for extreme scalability throughout, and deliberately avoids design features that could inhibit scalability.

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.

Dan Bonachea, Amir Kamil, "UPC++ v1.0 Specification, Revision 2021.9.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, September 2021, LBNL 2001425, doi: 10.25344/S4XK53


UPC++ is a C++ library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). All communication operations are syntactically explicit and default to non-blocking; asynchrony is managed through the use of futures, promises and continuation callbacks, enabling the programmer to construct a graph of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies are satisfied. A global pointer abstraction provides system-wide addressability of shared memory, including host and accelerator memories. The parallelism model is primarily process-based, but the interface is thread-safe and designed to allow efficient and expressive use in multi-threaded applications. The interface is designed for extreme scalability throughout, and deliberately avoids design features that could inhibit scalability.

Dan Bonachea, Amir Kamil, "UPC++ v1.0 Specification, Revision 2021.3.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 31, 2021, LBNL 2001388, doi: 10.25344/S4K881

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). All communication operations are syntactically explicit and default to non-blocking; asynchrony is managed through the use of futures, promises and continuation callbacks, enabling the programmer to construct a graph of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies are satisfied. A global pointer abstraction provides system-wide addressability of shared memory, including host and accelerator memories. The parallelism model is primarily process-based, but the interface is thread-safe and designed to allow efficient and expressive use in multi-threaded applications. The interface is designed for extreme scalability throughout, and deliberately avoids design features that could inhibit scalability.

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. 

Dan Bonachea, Amir Kamil, "UPC++ v1.0 Specification, Revision 2020.10.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, October 30, 2020, LBNL 2001367, doi: 10.25344/S4CS3F

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). All communication operations are syntactically explicit and default to non-blocking; asynchrony is managed through the use of futures, promises and continuation callbacks, enabling the programmer to construct a graph of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies are satisfied. A global pointer abstraction provides system-wide addressability of shared memory, including host and accelerator memories. The parallelism model is primarily process-based, but the interface is thread-safe and designed to allow efficient and expressive use in multi-threaded applications. The interface is designed for extreme scalability throughout, and deliberately avoids design features that could inhibit scalability.

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, Dan Bonachea, Amir Kamil, "UPC++ v1.0 Specification, Revision 2020.3.0", Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Tech Report, March 12, 2020, LBNL 2001268, doi: 10.25344/S4T01S

UPC++ is a C++11 library providing classes and functions that support Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming. The key communication facilities in UPC++ are one-sided Remote Memory Access (RMA) and Remote Procedure Call (RPC). All communication operations are syntactically explicit and default to non-blocking; asynchrony is managed through the use of futures, promises and continuation callbacks, enabling the programmer to construct a graph of operations to execute asynchronously as high-latency dependencies are satisfied. A global pointer abstraction provides system-wide addressability of shared memory, including host and accelerator memories. The parallelism model is primarily process-based, but the interface is thread-safe and designed to allow efficient and expressive use in multi-threaded applications. The interface is designed for extreme scalability throughout, and deliberately avoids design features that could inhibit scalability.

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.

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.

Adrian Tate, Amir Kamil, Anshu Dubey, Armin Größlinger, Brad Chamberlain, Brice Goglin, Carter Edwards, Chris J. Newburn, David Padua, Didem Unat, Emmanuel Jeannot, Frank Hannig, Gysi Tobias, Hatem Ltaief, James Sexton, Jesus Labarta, John Shalf, Karl Fuerlinger, Kathryn O’Brien, Leonidas Linardakis, Maciej Besta, Marie-Christine Sawley, Mark Abraham, Mauro Bianco, Miquel Pericàs, Naoya Maruyama, Paul Kelly, Peter Messmer, Robert B. Ross, Romain Cledat, Satoshi Matsuoka, Thomas Schulthess, Torsten Hoefler, Vitus Leung, "Programming Abstractions for Data Locality", 2014 Workshop on Programming Abstractions for Data Locality, April 29, 2014, doi: 10.2172/1172915

The goal of the workshop and this report is to identify common themes and standardize concepts for locality-preserving abstractions for exascale programming models. Current software tools are built on the premise that computing is the most expensive component, we are rapidly moving to an era that computing is cheap and massively parallel while data movement dominates energy and performance costs. In order to respond to exascale systems (the next generation of high performance computing systems), the scientific computing community needs to refactor their applications to align with the emerging data-centric paradigm. Our applications must be evolved to express information about data locality. Unfortunately current programming environments offer few ways to do so. They ignore the incurred cost of communication and simply rely on the hardware cache coherency to virtualize data movement. With the increasing importance of task-level parallelism on future systems, task models have to support constructs that express data locality and affinity. At the system level, communication libraries implicitly assume all the processing elements are equidistant to each other. In order to take advantage of emerging technologies, application developers need a set of programming abstractions to describe data locality for the new computing ecosystem. The new programming paradigm should be more data centric and allow to describe how to decompose and how to layout data in the memory.
Fortunately, there are many emerging concepts such as constructs for tiling, data layout, array views, task and thread affinity, and topology aware communication libraries for managing data locality. There is an opportunity to identify commonalities in strategy to enable us to combine the best of these concepts to develop a comprehen- sive approach to expressing and managing data locality on exascale programming systems. These programming model abstractions can expose crucial information about data locality to the compiler and runtime system to en- able performance-portable code. The research question is to identify the right level of abstraction, which includes techniques that range from template libraries all the way to completely new languages to achieve this goal.

The goal of the workshop and this report is to identify common themes and standardize concepts for locality-preserving abstractions for exascale programming models. Current software tools are built on the premise that computing is the most expensive component, we are rapidly moving to an era that computing is cheap and massively parallel while data movement dominates energy and performance costs. In order to respond to exascale systems (the next generation of high performance computing systems), the scientific computing community needs to refactor their applications to align with the emerging data-centric paradigm. Our applications must be evolved to express information about data locality. Unfortunately current programming environments offer few ways to do so. They ignore the incurred cost of communication and simply rely on the hardware cache coherency to virtualize data movement. With the increasing importance of task-level parallelism on future systems, task models have to support constructs that express data locality and affinity. At the system level, communication libraries implicitly assume all the processing elements are equidistant to each other. In order to take advantage of emerging technologies, application developers need a set of programming abstractions to describe data locality for the new computing ecosystem. The new programming paradigm should be more data centric and allow to describe how to decompose and how to layout data in the memory.

Fortunately, there are many emerging concepts such as constructs for tiling, data layout, array views, task and thread affinity, and topology aware communication libraries for managing data locality. There is an opportunity to identify commonalities in strategy to enable us to combine the best of these concepts to develop a comprehensive approach to expressing and managing data locality on exascale programming systems. These programming model abstractions can expose crucial information about data locality to the compiler and runtime system to enable performance-portable code. The research question is to identify the right level of abstraction, which includes techniques that range from template libraries all the way to completely new languages to achieve this goal.

Dan Bonachea, Paul Hilfinger, Kaushik Datta, David Gay, Susan Graham, Amir Kamil, Ben Liblit, Geoff Pike, Jimmy Su, Katherine Yelick, "Titanium Language Reference Manual, Version 2.20", University of California, Berkeley Tech Report (UCB/EECS-2005-15.1), August 3, 2006, doi: 10.25344/S4H59R

The Titanium language is a Java dialect for high-performance parallel scientific computing. Titanium’s differences from Java include multi-dimensional arrays, an explicitly parallel SPMD model of computation with a global address space, a form of value class, and zone-based memory management. This reference manual describes the differences between Titanium and Java.

Thesis/Dissertations

As performance gains in sequential programming have stagnated due to power constraints, parallel computing has become the primary tool for increasing performance. Parallel computing has long been used in scientific computing, and programmers of the future will likely face many of the same challenges that occur in programming large-scale machines. One such challenge is that of hierarchy: machines are built in a hierarchical fashion, with a wide range of communication costs between different parts of a machine, and applications such as divide-and-conquer algorithms often have hierarchical structure. Large-scale parallel machines are programmed primarily with the single program, multiple data (SPMD) model of parallelism. This model combines independent threads of execution with global collective communication and synchronization operations. Previous work has demonstrated the advantages of SPMD over other models: its simplicity enables productive programming and avoids many classes of parallel errors, and at the same time it is easy to implement and amenable to compiler analysis and optimization. Its local-view execution model allows programmers to take advantage of data locality, resulting in good performance and scalability on large-scale machines. However, it is a flat model that does not fit well with hierarchical machines or algorithms. In this dissertation, we introduce the recursive single program, multiple data (RSPMD) execution model. This model extends SPMD with hierarchical, structured teams, or groupings of threads. We design RSPMD extensions for the Titanium language, including a hierarchical team data structure and lexically-scoped constructs for operating over teams. We demonstrate that these extensions prevent erroneous use of teams that would result in deadlock. In addition, we present a runtime mechanism for ensuring proper use of both global collective operations and collectives over teams, eliminating more potential sources of deadlock. As analyzable as SPMD is, we demonstrate that RSPMD can also be analyzed precisely and efficiently. We define a hierarchical pointer analysis for determining which data a pointer can reference, as well as on which threads the referenced data may reside. We then present a series of analyses for computing the set of concurrent statements in both SPMD and RSPMD programs. We show that these analyses improve the results of multiple client analyses, including data-locality and sharing inference, race detection, and memory-model enforcement. Finally, we present application case studies demonstrating the expressiveness and performance of the RSPMD model. We show that the model enables divide-and-conquer algorithms such as sorting to be elegantly expressed, and that team collective operations increase performance of a conjugate gradient benchmark by up to a factor of two. The model also facilitates optimizations for hierarchical machines, improving scalability of a particle in cell application by 8x, performance of sorting by up to 40%, and execution time of a stencil code by as much as 14%.

Analysis of Partitioned Global Address Space Programs, Amir Kamil, M.S., December 2006,

 

The introduction of multi-core processors by the major microprocessor vendors has brought parallel programming
into the mainstream. Analysis of parallel languages is critical both for safety and optimization purposes. In this
report, we consider the specific case of languages with barrier synchronization and global address space abstractions.
Two of the fundamental problems in the analysis of parallel programs are to determine when two statements in a
program can execute concurrently, and what data can be referenced by each memory location. We present an efficient
interprocedural analysis algorithm that conservatively computes the set of all concurrent statements, and improve its
precision by using context-free language reachability to ignore infeasible program paths. In addition, we describe a
pointer analysis using a hierarchical machine model, which distinguishes between pointers that can reference values
within a thread, within a shared memory multiprocessor, or within a network of processors. We then apply the analyses
to two clients, data race detection and memory model enforcement. Using a set of five benchmarks, we show that both
clients benefit significantly from the analyses.

The introduction of multi-core processors by the major microprocessor vendors has brought parallel programming into the mainstream. Analysis of parallel languages is critical both for safety and optimization purposes. In this report, we consider the specific case of languages with barrier synchronization and global address space abstractions. Two of the fundamental problems in the analysis of parallel programs are to determine when two statements in a program can execute concurrently, and what data can be referenced by each memory location. We present an efficient interprocedural analysis algorithm that conservatively computes the set of all concurrent statements, and improve its precision by using context-free language reachability to ignore infeasible program paths. In addition, we describe a pointer analysis using a hierarchical machine model, which distinguishes between pointers that can reference values within a thread, within a shared memory multiprocessor, or within a network of processors. We then apply the analyses to two clients, data race detection and memory model enforcement. Using a set of five benchmarks, we show that both clients benefit significantly from the analyses. 

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, 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,

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, 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,

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,