Locale (computer hardware)

In computer architecture a locale is an abstraction of the concept of a localized set of hardware resources which are close enough to enjoy uniform memory access.
For instance, on a computer cluster each node may be considered a locale given that there is one instance of the operating system and uniform access to memory for processes running on that node. Similarly, on an SMP - [Symmetric Multiprocessor System|SMP system], each node may be defined as a locale. Parallel programming languages such as Chapel have specific constructs for declaring locales.