Performance monitoring and evaluation of a UPC implementation on a NUMA architecture

Abstract

UPC is an explicit parallel extension of ANSI C, which has been gaining rising attention from vendors and users. In this paper, we consider the low-level monitoring and experimental performance evaluation of a new implementation of the UPC compiler on the SGI Origin family of NUMA architectures. These systems offer many opportunities for the high-performance implantation of UPC They also offer, due to their many hardware monitoring counters, the opportunity for low-level performance measurements to guide compiler implementations. Early, UPC compilers have the challenge of meeting the syntax and semantics requirements of the language. As a result, such compilers tend to focus on correctness rather than on performance. In this paper, we report on the performance of selected applications and kernels under this new compiler. The measurements were designed to help shed some light on the next steps that should be taken by UPC compiler developers to harness the full performance and usability potential of UPC under these architectures.