Section: New Software and Platforms

hwloc

Hardware Locality

Keywords: NUMA - Multicore - GPU - Affinities - Open MPI - Topology - HPC - Locality

Functional Description: Hardware Locality (hwloc) is a library and set of tools aiming at discovering and exposing the topology of machines, including processors, cores, threads, shared caches, NUMA memory nodes and I/O devices. It builds a widely-portable abstraction of these resources and exposes it to applications so as to help them adapt their behavior to the hardware characteristics. They may consult the hierarchy of resources, their attributes, and bind task or memory on them.

hwloc targets many types of high-performance computing applications, from thread scheduling to placement of MPI processes. Most existing MPI implementations, several resource managers and task schedulers, and multiple other parallel libraries already use hwloc.

• Participants: Brice Goglin and Samuel Thibault

• Partners: Open MPI consortium - Intel - AMD

• Contact: Brice Goglin

• Publications: hwloc: a Generic Framework for Managing Hardware Affinities in HPC Applications - Managing the Topology of Heterogeneous Cluster Nodes with Hardware Locality (hwloc) - A Topology-Aware Performance Monitoring Tool for Shared Resource Management in Multicore Systems - Exposing the Locality of Heterogeneous Memory Architectures to HPC Applications - Towards the Structural Modeling of the Topology of next-generation heterogeneous cluster Nodes with hwloc - On the Overhead of Topology Discovery for Locality-aware Scheduling in HPC

• URL: http://www.open-mpi.org/projects/hwloc/