hwloc 2.3.0



Major release



> Read more Upgrading to v2.0 API



Guide for Porting your Code



> Read more XML topology database



Repository of XML topologies



> Read more The Best of lstopo



Best lstopo graphical outputs



> Read more

The Portable Hardware Locality (hwloc) software package provides a portable abstraction (across OS, versions, architectures, ...) of the hierarchical topology of modern architectures, including NUMA memory nodes, sockets, shared caches, cores and simultaneous multithreading. It also gathers various system attributes such as cache and memory information as well as the locality of I/O devices such as network interfaces, InfiniBand HCAs or GPUs.

hwloc primarily aims at helping applications with gathering information about increasingly complex parallel computing platforms so as to exploit them accordingly and efficiently. For instance, two tasks that tightly cooperate should probably be placed onto cores sharing a cache. However, two independent memory-intensive tasks should better be spread out onto different sockets so as to maximize their memory throughput. As described in this paper, OpenMP threads have to be placed according to their affinities and to the hardware characteristics. MPI implementations apply similar techniques while also adapting their communication strategies to the network locality as described in this paper or this one.

hwloc may also help many applications just by providing a portable CPU and memory binding API and a reliable way to find out how many cores and/or hardware threads are available.

Portability and support

hwloc supports the following operating systems:

Linux (including old kernels not having sysfs topology information, with knowledge of cgroups, offline CPUs, ScaleMP vSMP, and NumaScale NumaConnect) on all supported hardware, including Intel Xeon Phi.

Solaris, AIX and HP-UX

NetBSD, FreeBSD and kFreeBSD/GNU

Darwin / OS X

Microsoft Windows (either using MinGW, or Cygwin, or a native Visual Studio solution)

IBM BlueGene/Q Compute Node Kernel (CNK)

Additionally hwloc can detect the locality PCI devices as well as OpenCL, CUDA and Xeon Phi accelerators, network and InfiniBand interfaces, etc. See the Best of lstopo for more examples of supported platforms. The topologies of many existing platforms are also available in the XML topology database for testing your software on architectures you don't have access to.

hwloc may display the topology in multiple convenient formats (see v2.3.0 examples and the Best of lstopo). It also offers a powerful programming interface to gather information about the hardware, bind processes, and much more.

Since it uses standard Operating System information, hwloc's support is almost always independent from the processor type (x86, powerpc, ia64, ...), and just relies on the Operating System support. Whenever the OS does not support topology information (e.g. some BSDs), hwloc uses an x86-only CPUID-based backend.

To check whether hwloc works on a particular machine, just try to build it and run lstopo or lstopo-no-graphics . If some things do not look right (e.g. bogus or missing cache information), see Questions and bugs below

Documentation

More details are available in the Documentation (in both PDF and HTML). The documentation for each version contains examples of outputs and an API interface example (these links are for v2.3.0).

The materials from several hwloc tutorials are available online.

Getting and using hwloc

hwloc is open-source, available under the BSD license.

The latest hwloc releases are available on the download page. The GIT repository is also accessible for online browsing or checkout.

hwloc is already available as official packages for many Linux distributions (at least Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora/RHEL, SUSE, ArchLinux, Slackware, Gentoo and their derivatives), as well as NetBSD, FreeBSD, Cygwin, Mac OS X ports, and HP-UX. It is also available as EasyBuild and Spack packages.

The following langages also have dedicated bindings:

The following software already benefit from hwloc or are being ported to it:

Questions and bugs

Bugs should be reported in the tracker. Opening a new issue automatically displays lots of hints about how to debug and report issues.

See also the wiki page about Linux kernel bugs (or BIOS bugs) affecting locality information in hwloc.

Questions may be sent to the users or developers mailing lists.

There is also a #hwloc IRC channel on Freenode ( irc.freenode.net ).

Publications

For a general-purpose hwloc citations, please use the following one. This paper introduces hwloc, its goals and its implementation. It then shows how hwloc may be used by MPI implementations and OpenMP runtime systems as a way to carefully place processes and adapt communication strategies to the underlying hardware.

François Broquedis, Jérôme Clet-Ortega, Stéphanie Moreaud, Nathalie Furmento, Brice Goglin, Guillaume Mercier, Samuel Thibault, and Raymond Namyst. hwloc: a Generic Framework for Managing Hardware Affinities in HPC Applications. In Proceedings of the 18th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP2010), Pisa, Italia, February 2010. IEEE Computer Society Press. https://hal.inria.fr/inria-00429889

For citing how hwloc deals with new heterogeneous memory hierarchies (Knights Landing's MCDRAM, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), non-volatile memory (NVDIMM), etc), use this paper:

Brice Goglin. Exposing the Locality of Heterogeneous Memory Architectures to HPC Applications. In Proceedings of the First ACM International Symposium on Memory Systems (MEMSYS16), Washington, DC, USA, October 2016. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01330194

When discussing the overhead of topology discovery and why XML or synthetic topologies are useful, use this paper:

Brice Goglin. On the Overhead of Topology Discovery for Locality-aware Scheduling in HPC. In Proceedings of the 25th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP2017), St Petersburg, Russia, March 2017. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01402755

About the memory footprint of hwloc and the new shmem topology API in hwloc 2.0:

Brice Goglin. Memory Footprint of Locality Information on Many-Core Platforms. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Runtime and Operating Systems for the Many-core Era (ROME 2018), held in conjunction with IPDPS, Vancouvert, BC, Canada, May 2018. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01644087

For citing hwloc's I/O device locality and cluster/multi-node support, please use the following one instead. This paper explains how I/O locality is managed in hwloc, how device details are represented, how hwloc interacts with other libraries, and how multiple nodes such as a cluster can be efficiently managed.

Brice Goglin. Managing the Topology of Heterogeneous Cluster Nodes with Hardware Locality (hwloc). In Proceedings of 2014 International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation (HPCS 2014), Bologna, Italy, July 2014. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-00985096

For citing hwloc's hierarchical modeling of computing, memory and I/O resources as well as multi-node support, use this paper:

Brice Goglin. Towards the Structural Modeling of the Topology of next-generation heterogeneous cluster Nodes with hwloc. Inria, November 2016. https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01400264

History / credits

hwloc is the evolution and merger of the libtopology and Portable Linux Processor Affinity (PLPA) projects. Because of functional and ideological overlap, these two code bases and ideas were merged and released under the name "hwloc" as an Open MPI sub-project. hwloc is now mostly developed by the TADaaM team at Inria (Bordeaux, France).

libtopology was initially developed by the Inria Runtime team-project as a way to discover hardware affinities inside the Marcel threading library. With the advent of multicore machines, this work became interesting for much more than multithreading. So libtopology was extracted from Marcel and became an independent library.

Portability tests are performed thanks to the Inria Continuous Integration platform.

How do you pronounce "hwloc"?

When in doubt, say "hardware locality."

Some of the core developers say "H. W. Loke"; others say "H. W. Lock". We've heard several other pronunciations as well. We don't really have a strong preference for how you say it; we chose the name for its Google-ability, not its pronunciation.

But now at least you know how we pronounce it. :-)