About Berkeley UPC (Unified Parallel C)
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 start-up time, typically with a single thread of execution per processor.

In order to express parallelism, UPC extends ISO C 99 with the following constructs:
- An explicitly parallel execution model
- A shared address space
- Synchronization primitives and a memory consistency model
- Memory management primitives
- Many more features

What’s New in this Version
- New runtime features
- Experimental shared-memory support (see the section “Intra-Node Shared Memory Support” in Install.txt)
- Experimental collectives autotuner (see gasnet/Readme)
- Expand BUPC atomic extensions w/ additional operations and 32-bit types
- Enhance bupc_thread_distance() to detect processes on same compute node
- Many more enhancements.