INDUSTRY

PALO ALTO, CA -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) today announced the release of its newly developed UPC compiler for Tru64 UNIX, the first commercial release of a UPC compiler in the industry and a technological breakthrough for the high-performance technical computing market. The HP UPC Compiler V2.0 (formerly the Compaq UPC Compiler) is a fully complete implementation of the Unified Parallel C language as well as highly scalable and extremely high performing. Developed under a joint research agreement with the U.S. National Security Agency, it is the only implementation of UPC with independent documentation, run-time validation and tuning parameters and it supports all features in the official UPC language specification. "UPC is a new parallel variant of the C language that holds great promise as a means of simplifying the task of coding parallel programs while ensuring efficient execution," said Professor Katherine Yelick, University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence-Berkeley National Lab. "The HP compiler is the most sophisticated UPC compiler currently available. It implements the full UPC specification and provides application-level access to the low-latency Quadrics interconnect. It also performs caching and pre-fetching optimizations that allow programs written in a simple style to obtain high performance." UPC provides a simple shared memory model for parallel programming, allowing data to be shared or distributed among a number of communicating processors. This model promises easier coding of parallel applications and excellent performance across shared memory, distributed memory and hybrid systems. The HP UPC Compiler V2.0 is currently running at 16 large sites on three continents, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center in Pennsylvania and the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing in Australia, as well as at two large intelligence agencies and several universities. The HP UPC Compiler V2.0 is now available and priced from US$3,750 to US$80,000 depending on the number of CPUs required to execute the run-time code. More details about the HP UPC Compiler are available at http://www.tru64unix.compaq.com/upc/.