Berkeley UPC Release 2019.4.0

[Paul Hargrove]

We are pleased to announce the release of Berkeley UPC 2019.4.0 which is available for download from

      https://upc.lbl.gov/download/

This Berkeley UPC release embeds the latest GASNet-EX 2019.3.0.

This release introduces several new features, along with general improvements and bug fixes. Details are given in the ChangeLog excerpt below.

All downloads are also available from our mirror site at

      http://gasnet.sourceforge.net/releases

and from the downloads areas of the respective git repos (see below).

For anyone wishing to contribute to BUPC, we recommend obtaining the "develop" branch of our public git repository:

      https://bitbucket.org/berkeleylab/upc-runtime

-Paul Hargrove, on behalf of the developers of Berkeley UPC

Berkeley UPC release 2019.4.0 ChangeLog

• NEW: This release is the first in a new branch of Berkeley UPC that embeds and requires the new GASNet-EX communication system.
• UPC language compliance and translator support remains unchanged.
• NEW: Native, high-performance implementation of the UPC 1.3 atomics API
  Notably leverages atomics hardware offload support on Cray Aries.
  See the included Berkeley UPC User Guide for further details.
• The deprecated bupc_atomic* extensions have been removed.
• NEW: Added interoperability support for UPC++ (v2018.3.0 or later)
  See UPC++ interoperability documentation for details.
• bupc_extern API has been augmented with a new bupc_tentative interface to enable link-time interoperability with external packages like UPC++.
• NEW: Scalability improvements to buffer utilization in aries-conduit
• Totalview debugger integration support is now officially deprecated.
• UPC Thrille active testing feature is now officially deprecated.
• New envvar GASNET_CATCH_EXIT=0 improves compat w/perf tools like CrayPat
• Obsolete -heap-offset and -shared-heap-max options removed.
• Added bupc_system() to provide a workaround for fork() failures reported in bug 3090

• Improved platform support/portability
• Added support for macOS Mojave and Xcode 10
• Microsoft Windows 10 Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is now fully supported

• Fixed the following notable bugs in Berkeley UPC and GASNet libraries:
  Bug 495: Firehose has been replaced by ODP support on modern ibv NICs
  Bug 3791: Defects in stdint.h (U)INT_{32,64}_{MIN,MAX}
  Bug 3856: Improved robustness of crash behavior on Cygwin with -pthreads
  Bug 3902: Intermittent failures of upc_inverse_cast() on malloc'd pointers

Important caveats:

• This release removes support for the following network backends:
• Intel PSM2 for Omni-Path (psm) - no native support for this network in this release
• Mellanox-proprietary MXM (mxm) - ibv is recommended on InfiniBand hardware
• Portals4 beta conduit (portals4)
• This release temporarily removes support for the ofi (libfabric) network.
  Support will be restored in an upcoming release.
• Support for <upc_collective.h> combined with the `upcc -pthreads` option has been temporarily removed.  We hope to restore this in a later release - please contact us if this feature is important to you!

--

Paul H. Hargrove <PHHar...@lbl.gov>

Computer Languages & Systems Software (CLaSS) Group

Computer Science Department

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory