UPC benchmarking issues

UPC, or Unified Parallel C, is a parallel extension of ANSI C. UPC is developed around the distributed shared-memory programming model with constructs that can allow programmers to exploit memory locality, by placing data close to the threads that manipulate them in order to minimize remote accesses. Under the UPC memory sharing model, each thread owns a private memory and has a logical association (affinity) with a partition of the shared memory. This paper discusses an early release of UPC Bench, a benchmark designed to reveal UPC compilers performance weaknesses to uncover opportunities for compiler optimizations. The experimental results from UPC Bench over the Compaq AlphaServer SC show that UPC Bench is capable of discovering such compiler performance problems. Further, it shows that if such performance pitfalls are avoided through compiler optimizations, distributed shared memory programming paradigms can result in high-performance, while the ease of programming is enjoyed.