Each computer system will have a number of distinct places in which the system will allow you to allocate memory. In Umpire's world, these are memory resources. A memory resource can correspond to a hardware resource, but can also be used to identify memory with a particular characteristic, like "pinned" memory in a GPU system.
When you configure Umpire, it will create umpire::resource::MemoryResource s according to what is available on the system you are building for. For each resource (defined by MemoryResourceTraits::resource_type), Umpire will create a default umpire::Allocator that you can use. In the previous example, we were actually using an umpire::Allocator created for the memory resource corresponding to the CPU memory.
The easiest way to identify resources is by name. The "HOST" resource is always available. We also have resources that represent global GPU memory ("DEVICE"), constant GPU memory ("DEVICE_CONST"), unified memory that can be accessed by the CPU or GPU ("UM"), host memory that can be accessed by the GPU ("PINNED"), and mmapped file memory ("FILE"). If an incorrect name is used or if the allocator was not set up correctly, the "UNKNOWN" resource name is returned.
Umpire will create an umpire::Allocator for each of these resources, and you can get them using the same umpire::ResourceManager::getAllocator call you saw in the previous example:
../../../examples/tutorial/tut_resources.cpp
Note that since every allocator supports the same calls, no matter which resource it is for, this means we can run the same code for all the resources available in the system.
While using Umpire memory resources, it may be useful to query the memory resource currently associated with a particular allocator. For example, if we wanted to double check that our allocator is using the device resource, we can assert that MemoryResourceTraits::resource_type::device is equal to the return value of allocator.getAllocationStrategy()->getTraits().resource. The test code provided in memory_resource_traits_tests.cpp shows a complete example of how to query this information.
Note
In order to test some memory resources, you may need to configure your Umpire build to use a particular platform (a member of the umpire::Allocator, defined by Platform.hpp) that has access to that resource. See the Developer's Guide for more information.
Next, we will see an example of how to move data between resources using operations.
../../../examples/tutorial/tut_resources.cpp