Unified Parallel C (UPC) is an extension of the C programming language designed for high performance computing on large-scale parallel machines. The language provides a uniform programming model for both shared and distributed memory hardware. The programmer is presented with a single shared, partitioned address space, where variables may be directly read and written by any processor, but each variable is physically associated with a single processor. UPC uses a Single Program Multiple Data (SPMD) model of computation in which the amount of parallelism is fixed at program startup time, typically with a single thread of execution per processor. Berkeley UPC provides a portable, high-performance compiler for developing UPC software on systems ranging from clusters to custom supercomputers and even laptop-grade systems.
