Performance Evaluation of Unified Parallel C Collective Communications

Unified Parallel C (UPC) is an extension of ANSI C designed for parallel programming. UPC collective prim-itives, which are part of the UPC standard, increase pro-gramming productivity while reducing the communication overhead. This paper presents an up-to-date performance evaluation of two publicly available UPC collective im-plementations on three scenarios: shared, distributed, and hybrid shared/distributed memory architectures. The charac-terization of the throughput of collective primitives is useful for increasing performance through the runtime selection of the appropriate primitive implementation, which depends on the message size and the memory architecture, as well as to detect inefficient implementations. In fact, based on the analysis of the UPC collectives performance, we proposed some optimizations for the current UPC collective libraries. We have also compared the performance of the UPC col-lective primitives and their MPI counterparts, showing that there is room for improvement. Finally, this paper concludes with an analysis of the influence of the performance of the UPC collectives on a representative communication-intensive application, showing that their optimization is highly important for UPC scalability. 1