hwloc (Hardware Locality)

Software Name

Public URL

Technical Overview

hwloc gathers the topology of machines and exposes it as a hierarchical tree of resources such as processor packages, cores, hardware threads, caches, NUMA nodes and even I/O devices. The hwloc library is already used/embedded in some OpenHPC components such as OpenMPI and Slurm. However, the standalone hwloc library and command-line tools would also be useful, for instance when administrator/users when to quickly display the node topology with lstopo.

Latest stable version number

1.11.5 (rc1 released last week, final next monday)

Open-source license type

BSD-3

Relationship to component?

[x] contributing developer
[ ] user
[ ] other

If other, please describe:

Build system

[x] autotools-based
[ ] CMake
[ ] other

If other, please describe:

Does the current build system support staged path installations? For example: make install DESTIR=/tmp/foo (or equivalent)

[x] yes
[ ] no

Does component run in user space or are administrative credentials required?

[x] user space
[x] admin

The vast majority of the code runs as non-privileged user-space. For KNL (and possibly more in the future), a systemd service can be used to gather root-only information during boot (sysfs SMBIOS files that describe the memory configuration) and make it available to normal users.

Does component require post-installation configuration.

[x] yes
[ ] no

If yes, please describe briefly: Installation of a systemd service for better KNL topology detection.

If component is selected, are you willing and able to collaborate with OpenHPC maintainers during the integration process?

[x] yes
[ ] no

Does the component include test collateral (e.g. regression/verification tests) in the publicly shipped source?

[x] yes
[ ] no

If yes, please briefly describe the intent and location of the tests. autotools make check runs quite a lot of tests, either for the API, or for checking that topology discovery works.

Does the component have additional software dependencies (beyond compilers/MPI) that are not part of standard Linux distributions?

[ ] yes
[x] no

If yes, please list the dependencies and associated licenses.

Does the component include online or installable documentation?

[x] yes
[ ] no

If available online, please provide URL. https://www.open-mpi.org/projects/hwloc/doc/

[Optional]: Would you like to receive additional review feedback by email?

- [x] yes if anything cannot be public?! - [ ] no

openhpc / submissions