Introduction

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
packages, processor cores, processing units (logical processors or "threads")
and even I/O devices. hwloc also gathers various attributes such as cache and
memory information, and is portable across a variety of different operating
systems and platforms. Additionally it may assemble the topologies of multiple
machines into a single one so as to let applications consult the topology of an
entire fabric or cluster at once.

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 was 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. Prior
releases of hwloc included documentation about switching from PLPA to hwloc;
this documentation has been dropped on the assumption that everyone who was
using PLPA has already switched to hwloc.

hwloc supports the following operating systems:

  * Linux (including old kernels not having sysfs topology information, with
 knowledge of cpusets, offline CPUs, ScaleMP vSMP and Kerrighed support) on
 all supported hardware, including Intel Xeon Phi (KNL and KNC, either
 standalone or as a coprocessor) and NumaScale NumaConnect.
  * Solaris
  * AIX
  * Darwin / OS X
  * FreeBSD and its variants (such as kFreeBSD/GNU)
  * NetBSD
  * OSF/1 (a.k.a., Tru64)
  * HP-UX
  * Microsoft Windows
  * IBM BlueGene/Q Compute Node Kernel (CNK)

Since it uses standard Operating System information, hwloc's support is mostly
independant from the processor type (x86, powerpc, ...) and just relies on the
Operating System support. The only exception to this is kFreeBSD, which does
not support topology information, and hwloc thus uses an x86-only CPUID-based
backend (which can be used for other OSes too, see the Components and plugins
section).

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.

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:

  * Symmetrical tree of resources generated from a list of level arities
  * 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 CLI 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.

Perl bindings are available from Bernd Kallies on CPAN.

Python bindings are available from Guy Streeter:

  * Fedora RPM and tarball.
  * git tree (html).

Installation

hwloc (http://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 (http://
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 cloned from Git:

shell$ git clone https://github.com/open-mpi/hwloc.git
shell$ cd hwloc
shell$ ./autogen.sh

Note that GNU Autoconf >=2.63, Automake >=1.10 and Libtool >=2.2.6 are required
when building from a Git clone.

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 (usually cairo-devel or libcairo2-dev) can be found in "lstopo" when
hwloc is configured and build.

The hwloc core may also benefit from the following development packages:

  * libnuma for memory binding and migration support on Linux (numactl-devel or
 libnuma-dev package).
  * libpciaccess for full I/O device discovery (libpciaccess-devel or
 libpciaccess-dev package). On Linux, PCI discovery may still be performed
 (without vendor/device names) even if libpciaccess cannot be used.

  * the AMD OpenCL implementation for OpenCL device discovery.
  * the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit for CUDA device discovery.
  * the NVIDIA Tesla Development Kit for NVML device discovery.
  * the NV-CONTROL X extension library (NVCtrl) for NVIDIA display discovery.
  * libxml2 for full XML import/export support (otherwise, the internal
 minimalistic parser will only be able to import XML files that were
 exported by the same hwloc release). See Importing and exporting topologies
 from/to XML files for details. The relevant development package is usually
 libxml2-devel or libxml2-dev.
  * libudev on Linux for easier discovery of OS device information (otherwise
 hwloc will try to manually parse udev raw files). The relevant development
 package is usually libudev-devel or libudev-dev.
  * libtool's ltdl library for dynamic plugin loading. The relevant development
 package is usually libtool-ltdl-devel or libltdl-dev.

PCI and XML support may be statically built inside the main hwloc library, or
as separate dynamically-loaded plugins (see the Components and plugins
section).

Note that because of the possibility of GPL taint, the pciutils library libpci
will not be used (remember that hwloc is BSD-licensed).

Also note that if you install supplemental libraries in non-standard locations,
hwloc's configure script may not be able to find them without some help. You
may need to specify additional CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS, or PKG_CONFIG_PATH values on
the configure command line.

For example, if libpciaccess was installed into /opt/pciaccess, hwloc's
configure script may not find it be default. Try adding PKG_CONFIG_PATH to the
./configure command line, like this:

./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/pciaccess/lib/pkgconfig ...

CLI Examples

On a 4-package 2-core machine with hyper-threading, the lstopo tool may show
the following graphical output:

dudley.png

Here's the equivalent output in textual form:

Machine (16GB)
  Package L#0 + L3 L#0 (4096KB)
 L2 L#0 (1024KB) + L1 L#0 (16KB) + Core L#0
   PU L#0 (P#0)
   PU L#1 (P#8)
 L2 L#1 (1024KB) + L1 L#1 (16KB) + Core L#1
   PU L#2 (P#4)
   PU L#3 (P#12)
  Package L#1 + L3 L#1 (4096KB)
 L2 L#2 (1024KB) + L1 L#2 (16KB) + Core L#2
   PU L#4 (P#1)
   PU L#5 (P#9)
 L2 L#3 (1024KB) + L1 L#3 (16KB) + Core L#3
   PU L#6 (P#5)
   PU L#7 (P#13)
  Package L#2 + L3 L#2 (4096KB)
 L2 L#4 (1024KB) + L1 L#4 (16KB) + Core L#4
   PU L#8 (P#2)
   PU L#9 (P#10)
 L2 L#5 (1024KB) + L1 L#5 (16KB) + Core L#5
   PU L#10 (P#6)
   PU L#11 (P#14)
  Package L#3 + L3 L#3 (4096KB)
 L2 L#6 (1024KB) + L1 L#6 (16KB) + Core L#6
   PU L#12 (P#3)
   PU L#13 (P#11)
 L2 L#7 (1024KB) + L1 L#7 (16KB) + Core L#7
   PU L#14 (P#7)
   PU L#15 (P#15)

Note that there is also an equivalent output in XML that is meant for exporting
/importing topologies but it is hardly readable to human-beings (see Importing
and exporting topologies from/to XML files for details).

On a 4-package 2-core Opteron NUMA machine, the lstopo tool may show the
following graphical output:

hagrid.png

Here's the equivalent output in textual form:

Machine (32GB)
  NUMANode L#0 (P#0 8190MB) + Package L#0
 L2 L#0 (1024KB) + L1 L#0 (64KB) + Core L#0 + PU L#0 (P#0)
 L2 L#1 (1024KB) + L1 L#1 (64KB) + Core L#1 + PU L#1 (P#1)
  NUMANode L#1 (P#1 8192MB) + Package L#1
 L2 L#2 (1024KB) + L1 L#2 (64KB) + Core L#2 + PU L#2 (P#2)
 L2 L#3 (1024KB) + L1 L#3 (64KB) + Core L#3 + PU L#3 (P#3)
  NUMANode L#2 (P#2 8192MB) + Package L#2
 L2 L#4 (1024KB) + L1 L#4 (64KB) + Core L#4 + PU L#4 (P#4)
 L2 L#5 (1024KB) + L1 L#5 (64KB) + Core L#5 + PU L#5 (P#5)
  NUMANode L#3 (P#3 8192MB) + Package L#3
 L2 L#6 (1024KB) + L1 L#6 (64KB) + Core L#6 + PU L#6 (P#6)
 L2 L#7 (1024KB) + L1 L#7 (64KB) + Core L#7 + PU L#7 (P#7)

On a 2-package quad-core Xeon (pre-Nehalem, with 2 dual-core dies into each
package):

emmett.png

Here's the same output in textual form:

Machine (16GB)
  Package L#0
 L2 L#0 (4096KB)
   L1 L#0 (32KB) + Core L#0 + PU L#0 (P#0)
   L1 L#1 (32KB) + Core L#1 + PU L#1 (P#4)
 L2 L#1 (4096KB)
   L1 L#2 (32KB) + Core L#2 + PU L#2 (P#2)
   L1 L#3 (32KB) + Core L#3 + PU L#3 (P#6)
  Package L#1
 L2 L#2 (4096KB)
   L1 L#4 (32KB) + Core L#4 + PU L#4 (P#1)
   L1 L#5 (32KB) + Core L#5 + PU L#5 (P#5)
 L2 L#3 (4096KB)
   L1 L#6 (32KB) + Core L#6 + PU L#6 (P#3)
   L1 L#7 (32KB) + Core L#7 + PU L#7 (P#7)

Programming Interface

The basic interface is available in hwloc.h. Some higher-level functions are
available in hwloc/helper.h to reduce the need to manually manipulate objects
and follow links between them. Documentation for all these is provided later in
this document. Developers may also want to look at hwloc/inlines.h which
contains the actual inline code of some hwloc.h routines, and at this document,
which provides good higher-level topology traversal examples.

To precisely define the vocabulary used by hwloc, a Terms and Definitions
section is available and should probably be read first.

Each hwloc object contains a cpuset describing the list of processing units
that it contains. These bitmaps may be used for CPU binding and Memory binding.
hwloc offers an extensive bitmap manipulation interface in hwloc/bitmap.h.

Moreover, hwloc also comes with additional helpers for interoperability with
several commonly used environments. See the Interoperability With Other
Software section for details.

The complete API 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/.

NOTE: If you are building the documentation from a Git clone, 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).

Portability

As shown in CLI Examples, hwloc can obtain information on a wide variety of
hardware topologies. However, some platforms and/or operating system versions
will only report a subset of this information. For example, on an PPC64-based
system with 32 cores (each with 2 hardware threads) running a default
2.6.18-based kernel from RHEL 5.4, hwloc is only able to glean information
about NUMA nodes and processor units (PUs). No information about caches,
packages, or cores is available.

Similarly, Operating System have varying support for CPU and memory binding,
e.g. while some Operating Systems provide interfaces for all kinds of CPU and
memory bindings, some others provide only interfaces for a limited number of
kinds of CPU and memory binding, and some do not provide any binding interface
at all. Hwloc's binding functions would then simply return the ENOSYS error
(Function not implemented), meaning that the underlying Operating System does
not provide any interface for them. CPU binding and Memory binding provide more
information on which hwloc binding functions should be preferred because
interfaces for them are usually available on the supported Operating Systems.

Here's the graphical output from lstopo on this platform when Simultaneous
Multi-Threading (SMT) is enabled:

ppc64-with-smt.png

And here's the graphical output from lstopo on this platform when SMT is
disabled:

ppc64-without-smt.png

Notice that hwloc only sees half the PUs when SMT is disabled. PU #15, for
example, seems to change location from NUMA node #0 to #1. In reality, no PUs
"moved" -- they were simply re-numbered when hwloc only saw half as many.
Hence, PU #15 in the SMT-disabled picture probably corresponds to PU #30 in the
SMT-enabled picture.

This same "PUs have disappeared" effect can be seen on other platforms -- even
platforms / OSs that provide much more information than the above PPC64 system.
This is an unfortunate side-effect of how operating systems report information
to hwloc.

Note that upgrading the Linux kernel on the same PPC64 system mentioned above
to 2.6.34, hwloc is able to discover all the topology information. The
following picture shows the entire topology layout when SMT is enabled:

ppc64-full-with-smt.png

Developers using the hwloc API or XML output for portable applications should
therefore be extremely careful to not make any assumptions about the structure
of data that is returned. For example, per the above reported PPC topology, it
is not safe to assume that PUs will always be descendants of cores.

Additionally, future hardware may insert new topology elements that are not
available in this version of hwloc. Long-lived applications that are meant to
span multiple different hardware platforms should also be careful about making
structure assumptions. For example, there may someday be an element "lower"
than a PU, or perhaps a new element may exist between a core and a PU.

API Example

The following small C example (named ``hwloc-hello.c'') prints the topology of
the machine and bring the process to the first logical processor of the second
core of the machine. More examples are available in the doc/examples/ directory
of the source tree.

/* Example hwloc API program.
 *
 * See other examples under doc/examples/ in the source tree
 * for more details.
 *
 * Copyright (c) 2009-2015 Inria.  All rights reserved.
 * Copyright (c) 2009-2011 Universit?eacute; Bordeaux
 * Copyright (c) 2009-2010 Cisco Systems, Inc.  All rights reserved.
 * See COPYING in top-level directory.
 *
 * hwloc-hello.c
 */

#include <hwloc.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

static void print_children(hwloc_topology_t topology, hwloc_obj_t obj, 
                        int depth)
{
 char type[32], attr[1024];
 unsigned i;

 hwloc_obj_type_snprintf(type, sizeof(type), obj, 0);
 printf("%*s%s", 2*depth, "", type);
 if (obj->os_index != (unsigned) -1)
   printf("#%u", obj->os_index);
 hwloc_obj_attr_snprintf(attr, sizeof(attr), obj, " ", 0);
 if (*attr)
   printf("(%s)", attr);
 printf("\n");
 for (i = 0; i < obj->arity; i++) {
     print_children(topology, obj->children[i], depth + 1);
 }
}

int main(void)
{
 int depth;
 unsigned i, n;
 unsigned long size;
 int levels;
 char string[128];
 int topodepth;
 hwloc_topology_t topology;
 hwloc_cpuset_t cpuset;
 hwloc_obj_t obj;

 /* Allocate and initialize topology object. */
 hwloc_topology_init(&topology);

 /* ... Optionally, put detection configuration here to ignore
    some objects types, define a synthetic topology, etc....  

    The default is to detect all the objects of the machine that
    the caller is allowed to access.  See Configure Topology
    Detection. */

 /* Perform the topology detection. */
 hwloc_topology_load(topology);

 /* Optionally, get some additional topology information
    in case we need the topology depth later. */
 topodepth = hwloc_topology_get_depth(topology);

 /*****************************************************************
  * First example:
  * Walk the topology with an array style, from level 0 (always
  * the system level) to the lowest level (always the proc level).
  *****************************************************************/
 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_type_snprintf(string, sizeof(string),
                                 hwloc_get_obj_by_depth
(topology, depth, i), 0);
         printf("Index %u: %s\n", i, string);
     }
 }

 /*****************************************************************
  * Second example:
  * Walk the topology with a tree style.
  *****************************************************************/
 printf("*** Printing overall tree\n");
 print_children(topology, hwloc_get_root_obj(topology), 0);

 /*****************************************************************
  * Third example:
  * Print the number of packages.
  *****************************************************************/
 depth = hwloc_get_type_depth(topology, HWLOC_OBJ_PACKAGE);
 if (depth == HWLOC_TYPE_DEPTH_UNKNOWN) {
     printf("*** The number of packages is unknown\n");
 } else {
     printf("*** %u package(s)\n",
            hwloc_get_nbobjs_by_depth(topology, depth));
 }

 /*****************************************************************
  * Fourth example:
  * Compute the amount of cache that the first logical processor
  * has above it.
  *****************************************************************/
 levels = 0;
 size = 0;
 for (obj = hwloc_get_obj_by_type(topology, HWLOC_OBJ_PU, 0);
      obj;
      obj = obj->parent)
   if (obj->type == HWLOC_OBJ_CACHE) {
     levels++;
     size += obj->attr->cache.size;
   }
 printf("*** Logical processor 0 has %d caches totaling %luKB\n", 
        levels, size / 1024);

 /*****************************************************************
  * Fifth example:
  * Bind to only one thread of the last core of the machine.
  *
  * First find out where cores are, or else smaller sets of CPUs if
  * the OS doesn't have the notion of a "core".
  *****************************************************************/
 depth = hwloc_get_type_or_below_depth(topology, HWLOC_OBJ_CORE);

 /* Get last core. */
 obj = hwloc_get_obj_by_depth(topology, depth,
                hwloc_get_nbobjs_by_depth(topology, depth) - 1);
 if (obj) {
     /* Get a copy of its cpuset that we may modify. */
     cpuset = hwloc_bitmap_dup(obj->cpuset);

     /* Get only one logical processor (in case the core is
        SMT/hyper-threaded). */
     hwloc_bitmap_singlify(cpuset);

     /* And try to bind ourself there. */
     if (hwloc_set_cpubind(topology, cpuset, 0)) {
         char *str;
         int error = errno;
         hwloc_bitmap_asprintf(&str, obj->cpuset);
         printf("Couldn't bind to cpuset %s: %s\n", str, strerror(error));
         free(str);
     }

     /* Free our cpuset copy */
     hwloc_bitmap_free(cpuset);
 }

 /*****************************************************************
  * Sixth example:
  * Allocate some memory on the last NUMA node, bind some existing
  * memory to the last NUMA node.
  *****************************************************************/
 /* Get last node. */
 n = hwloc_get_nbobjs_by_type(topology, HWLOC_OBJ_NUMANODE);
 if (n) {
     void *m;
     size = 1024*1024;

     obj = hwloc_get_obj_by_type(topology, HWLOC_OBJ_NUMANODE, n - 1);
     m = hwloc_alloc_membind_nodeset(topology, size, obj->nodeset,
             HWLOC_MEMBIND_BIND, 0);
     hwloc_free(topology, m, size);

     m = malloc(size);
     hwloc_set_area_membind_nodeset(topology, m, size, obj->nodeset,
             HWLOC_MEMBIND_BIND, 0);
     free(m);
 }

 /* Destroy topology object. */
 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 packages -- each package of which
has two processing cores -- the output from running hwloc-hello could be
something like the following:

shell$ ./hwloc-hello
*** Objects at level 0
Index 0: Machine(3938MB)
*** Objects at level 1
Index 0: Package#0
Index 1: Package#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: PU#0
Index 1: PU#1
Index 2: PU#2
Index 3: PU#3
*** Printing overall tree
Machine(3938MB)
  Package#0
 Core#0
   PU#0
 Core#1
   PU#1
  Package#1
 Core#3
   PU#2
 Core#2
   PU#3
*** 2 package(s)
shell$

Questions and Bugs

Questions should be sent to the devel mailing list (http://www.open-mpi.org/
community/lists/hwloc.php). Bug reports should be reported in the tracker (
https://github.com/open-mpi/hwloc/issues).

If hwloc discovers an incorrect topology for your machine, the very first thing
you should check is to ensure that you have the most recent updates installed
for your operating system. Indeed, most of hwloc topology discovery relies on
hardware information retrieved through the operation system (e.g., via the /sys
virtual filesystem of the Linux kernel). If upgrading your OS or Linux kernel
does not solve your problem, you may also want to ensure that you are running
the most recent version of the BIOS for your machine.

If those things fail, contact us on the mailing list for additional help.
Please attach the output of lstopo after having given the --enable-debug option
to ./configure and rebuilt completely, to get debugging output. Also attach the
/proc + /sys tarball generated by the installed script hwloc-gather-topology
when submitting problems about Linux, or send the output of kstat cpu_info in
the Solaris case, or the output of sysctl hw in the Darwin or BSD cases.

History / Credits

hwloc is the evolution and merger of the libtopology (http://
runtime.bordeaux.inria.fr/libtopology/) project and the Portable Linux
Processor Affinity (PLPA) (http://www.open-mpi.org/projects/plpa/) project.
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.

libtopology was initially developed by the inria Runtime Team-Project (http://
runtime.bordeaux.inria.fr/) (headed by Raymond Namyst (http://
dept-info.labri.fr/~namyst/). PLPA was initially developed by the Open MPI
development team as a sub-project. Both are now deprecated in favor of hwloc,
which is distributed as an Open MPI sub-project.

Further Reading

The documentation chapters include

  * Terms and Definitions
  * Command-Line Tools
  * Environment Variables
  * CPU and Memory Binding Overview
  * I/O Devices
  * Miscellaneous objects
  * Multi-node Topologies
  * Object attributes
  * Importing and exporting topologies from/to XML files
  * Synthetic topologies
  * Interoperability With Other Software
  * Thread Safety
  * Components and plugins
  * Embedding hwloc in Other Software
  * Frequently Asked Questions

Make sure to have had a look at those too!

