[m-dev.] Portable Hardware Locality

[Paul Bone]

Hi Zoltan and Peter,

Some time ago I spoke about a library that helps a program discover the
characteristics of the parallel machine it's running on.  This is it:

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

http://www.open-mpi.org/projects/hwloc/doc/v1.1/

As you can see it tells the caller about the cache hierarchy of the machine.
This can help us configure Mercury's runtime system including tunable
parameters.

Furthermore it provides an abstraction over hardware and operating systems.

I propose that we modify Mercury to make use of this if it is available at
build time, otherwise we fallback to our current hardware detection methods
which are limited to Linux on x86 or x86-64 - and gather much less information.

I've CC'd this to the list incase others such as Peter Wang have anything to
contribute here.

Thanks.

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