Toward unprivileged, portable and generic network topology discovery

With the increase in size and complexity of supercomputers, it has become crucial to match applications and communication libraries to the underlying network topology. This matching may allow minimizing the time spent in waiting for high-latency communication and limiting contention on the network. While MPI implementations rely mostly on software such as hwloc to retrieve information about nodes topology, no tool currently gathers network topology information in a generic and portable fashion.