hwloc
0.9.3
Portable abstraction of hierarchical architectures for high-performance computing
hwloc provides command line tools and a C API to obtain the hierarchical map of key computing elements, such as: NUMA memory nodes, shared caches, processor sockets, processor cores, and processor "threads". hwloc also gathers various attributes such as cache and memory information, and is portable across a variety of different operating systems and platforms.
hwloc primarily aims at helping high-performance computing (HPC) applications, but is also applicable to any project seeking to exploit code and/or data locality on modern computing platforms.
Note that the hwloc project represents the merger of the libtopology project from INRIA and the Portable Linux Processor Affinity (PLPA) sub-project from Open MPI. Both of these prior projects are now deprecated. The first hwloc release is essentially a "re-branding" of the libtopology code base, but with both a few genuinely new features and a few PLPA-like features added in. More new features and more PLPA-like features will be added to hwloc over time.
hwloc supports the following operating systems:
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Linux (including old kernels not having sysfs topology information, with knowledge of cpusets, offline cpus, and Kerrighed support)
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Solaris
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AIX
-
Darwin / OS X
-
OSF/1 (a.k.a., Tru64)
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HP-UX
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Microsoft Windows
hwloc only reports the number of processors on unsupported operating systems; no topology information is available.
For development and debugging purposes, hwloc also offers the ability to work on "fake" topologies:
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Symmetrical tree of resources generated from a list of level arities
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Remote machine simulation through the gathering of Linux sysfs topology files
hwloc can display the topology in a human-readable format, either in graphical mode (X11), or by exporting in one of several different formats, including: plain text, PDF, PNG, and FIG (see Examples below). Note that some of the export formats require additional support libraries.
hwloc offers a programming interface for manipulating topologies and objects. It also brings a powerful CPU bitmap API that is used to describe topology objects location on physical/logical processors. See the Programming interface below. It may also be used to binding applications onto certain cores or memory nodes. Several utility programs are also provided to ease command-line manipulation of topology objects, binding of processes, and so on.
hwloc (https://www.open-mpi.org/projects/hwloc/) is available under the BSD license. It is hosted as a sub-project of the overall Open MPI project (https://www.open-mpi.org/). Note that hwloc does not require any functionality from Open MPI -- it is a wholly separate (and much smaller!) project and code base. It just happens to be hosted as part of the overall Open MPI project.
Nightly development snapshots are available on the web site. Additionally, the code can be directly checked out of Subversion:
shell$ svn checkout http:
shell$ cd hwloc-trunk
shell$ ./autogen.sh
Note that GNU Autoconf >=2.60, Automake >=1.10 and Libtool >=2.2.6 are required when building from a Subversion checkout.
Installation by itself is the fairly common GNU-based process:
shell$ ./configure --prefix=...
shell$ make
shell$ make install
The hwloc command-line tool "lstopo" produces human-readable topology maps, as mentioned above. It can also export maps to the "fig" file format. Support for PDF, Postscript, and PNG exporting is provided if the "Cairo" development package can be found when hwloc is configured and build. Similarly, lstopo's XML support requires the libxml2 development package.
On a 4-socket 2-core machine with hyperthreading, the lstopo tool may show the following outputs:
System(15GB)
Socket#0 + L3(4096KB)
L2(1024KB) + L1(16KB) + Core#0
P#0
P#8
L2(1024KB) + L1(16KB) + Core#1
P#4
P#12
Socket#1 + L3(4096KB)
L2(1024KB) + L1(16KB) + Core#0
P#1
P#9
L2(1024KB) + L1(16KB) + Core#1
P#5
P#13
Socket#2 + L3(4096KB)
L2(1024KB) + L1(16KB) + Core#0
P#2
P#10
L2(1024KB) + L1(16KB) + Core#1
P#6
P#14
Socket#3 + L3(4096KB)
L2(1024KB) + L1(16KB) + Core#0
P#3
P#11
L2(1024KB) + L1(16KB) + Core#1
P#7
P#15
On a 4-socket 2-core Opteron NUMA machine, the lstopo tool may show the following outputs:
System(62GB)
Node#0(8190MB) + Socket#0
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#0 + P#0
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#1 + P#1
Node#1(8192MB) + Socket#1
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#0 + P#2
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#1 + P#3
Node#2(8192MB) + Socket#2
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#0 + P#4
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#1 + P#5
Node#3(8192MB) + Socket#3
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#0 + P#6
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#1 + P#7
Node#4(8192MB) + Socket#4
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#0 + P#8
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#1 + P#9
Node#5(8192MB) + Socket#5
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#0 + P#10
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#1 + P#11
Node#6(8192MB) + Socket#6
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#0 + P#12
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#1 + P#13
Node#7(8192MB) + Socket#7
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#0 + P#14
L2(1024KB) + L1(64KB) + Core#1 + P#15
On a 2-socket quad-core Xeon (pre-Nehalem, with 2 dual-core dies into each socket):
System(15GB)
Socket#0
L2(4096KB)
L1(32KB) + Core#0 + P#0
L1(32KB) + Core#1 + P#4
L2(4096KB)
L1(32KB) + Core#2 + P#2
L1(32KB) + Core#3 + P#6
Socket#1
L2(4096KB)
L1(32KB) + Core#0 + P#1
L1(32KB) + Core#1 + P#5
L2(4096KB)
L1(32KB) + Core#2 + P#3
L1(32KB) + Core#3 + P#7
The basic interface is available in hwloc.h. It mostly offers low-level routines for advanced programmers that want to manually manipulate objects and follow links between them. Developers should look at hwloc/helper.h, which provides good higher-level topology traversal examples.
Each object contains a cpuset describing the list of processors that it contains. These cpusets may be used for Binding. hwloc offers an extensive cpuset manipulation interface in hwloc/cpuset.h.
Moreover, hwloc also comes with additional helpers for interoperability with several commonly used environments. For Linux, some specific helpers are available in hwloc/linux.h, and hwloc/linux-libnuma.h if using libnuma. On glibc-based systems, additional helpers are available in hwloc/glibc-sched.h. For Linux systems with the OpenFabrics verbs library, some dedicated helpers are provided in hwloc/openfabrics-verbs.h (this helper file is not yet useful on non-Linux systems with the OpenFabrics verbs library).
To precisely define the vocabulary used by hwloc, a Glossary is available and should probably be read first.
Further documentation is available in a full set of HTML pages, man pages, and self-contained PDF files (formatted for both both US letter and A4 formats) in the source tarball in doc/doxygen-doc/. If you are building from a Subversion checkout, you will need to have Doxygen and pdflatex installed -- the documentation will be built during the normal "make" process. The documentation is installed during "make
install" to $prefix/share/doc/hwloc/ and your systems default man page tree (under $prefix, of course).
The following section presents an example of API usage.
The following small C example (named ``hwloc-hello.c'') prints the topology of the machine and bring the process to the first processor of the second core of the machine.
#include <hwloc.h>
static void print_children(hwloc_topology_t topology, hwloc_obj_t obj,
int depth)
{
char string[128];
int i;
hwloc_obj_snprintf(string, sizeof(string), topology, obj, "#", 0);
printf("%*s%s\n", 2*depth, "", string);
for (i = 0; i < obj->arity; i++) {
print_children(topology, obj->children[i], depth + 1);
}
}
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
int depth, i;
char string[128];
unsigned int topodepth;
hwloc_topology_t topology;
hwloc_cpuset_t cpuset;
hwloc_obj_t obj;
hwloc_topology_init(&topology);
hwloc_topology_load(topology);
topodepth = hwloc_topology_get_depth(topology);
for (depth = 0; depth < topodepth; depth++) {
printf("*** Objects at level %d\n", depth);
for (i = 0; i < hwloc_get_nbobjs_by_depth(topology, depth);
i++) {
hwloc_obj_snprintf(string, sizeof(string), topology,
hwloc_get_obj_by_depth(topology, depth, i),
"#", 0);
printf("Index %d: %s\n", i, string);
}
}
printf("*** Printing overall tree\n");
print_children(topology, hwloc_get_system_obj(topology), 0);
depth = hwloc_get_type_depth(topology, HWLOC_OBJ_SOCKET);
if (depth == HWLOC_TYPE_DEPTH_UNKNOWN) {
printf("*** The number of sockets is unknown\n");
} else {
printf("*** %u socket(s)\n",
hwloc_get_nbobjs_by_depth(topology, depth));
}
depth = hwloc_get_type_or_below_depth(topology, HWLOC_OBJ_CORE);
obj = hwloc_get_obj_by_depth(topology, depth,
hwloc_get_nbobjs_by_depth(topology, depth) - 1);
if (obj) {
cpuset = hwloc_cpuset_dup(obj->cpuset);
hwloc_cpuset_singlify(cpuset);
if (hwloc_set_cpubind(topology, cpuset, 0)) {
char *str;
hwloc_cpuset_asprintf(&str, obj->cpuset);
printf("Couldn't bind to cpuset %s\n", str);
free(str);
}
hwloc_cpuset_free(cpuset);
}
hwloc_topology_destroy(topology);
return 0;
}
hwloc provides a pkg-config executable to obtain relevant compiler and linker flags. For example, it can be used thusly to compile applications that utilize the hwloc library (assuming GNU Make):
CFLAGS += $(pkg-config --cflags hwloc)
LDLIBS += $(pkg-config --libs hwloc)
cc hwloc-hello.c $(CFLAGS) -o hwloc-hello $(LDLIBS)
On a machine with 4GB of RAM and 2 processor sockets -- each socket of which has two processor cores -- the output from running hwloc-hello could be something like the following:
shell$ ./hwloc-hello
*** Objects at level 0
Index 0: System(3938MB)
*** Objects at level 1
Index 0: Socket#0
Index 1: Socket#1
*** Objects at level 2
Index 0: Core#0
Index 1: Core#1
Index 2: Core#3
Index 3: Core#2
*** Objects at level 3
Index 0: P#0
Index 1: P#1
Index 2: P#2
Index 3: P#3
*** Printing overall tree
System(3938MB)
Socket#0
Core#0
P#0
Core#1
P#1
Socket#1
Core#3
P#2
Core#2
P#3
*** 2 socket(s)
shell$
- Object
Interesting kind of part of the system, such as a Core, a Cache, a Memory node, etc. The different types detected by hwloc are detailed in the hwloc_obj_type_t enumeration.
They are topologically sorted by CPU set into a tree whose root is the System object (which always exists).
- CPU set
The set of logical processors logically included in an object (if any). This term does not have any relation to an operating system ``CPU set.''
- Father object
The object logically containing the current object, for example because its CPU set includes the CPU set of the current object.
- Children object(s)
The object (or objects) contained in the current object because their CPU set is included in the CPU set of the current object.
- Arity
The number of children of an object.
- Sibling objects
Objects of the same type which have the same father.
- Sibling rank
Index to uniquely identify objects of the same type which have the same father, and is always in the range [0, fathers_arity).
- Cousin objects
Objects of the same type as the current object.
- Level
Set of objects of the same type.
- OS index
The index that the operating system (OS) uses to identify the object. This may be completely arbitrary, or it may depend on the BIOS configuration.
- Depth
Nesting level in the object tree, starting from the 0th object (i.e., the System object).
- Logical index
Index to uniquely identify objects of the same type. It is generally used to express proximity. This index is always linear and in the range [0, num_objs_same_type_same_level). Think of it as ``cousin rank.''
The following diagram can help to understand the vocabulary of the relationships by showing the example of a machine with two dual core sockets (with no hardware threads); thus, a topology with 4 levels.
It should be noted that for Processor objects, the logical index -- as computed linearly by hwloc -- is not the same as the OS index.
