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Subject: Re: How good to use a LAN for chess computing?

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 03:02:24 09/16/01

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On September 15, 2001 at 22:34:27, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On September 15, 2001 at 03:28:18, Tony Werten wrote:
>
>>On September 14, 2001 at 22:56:06, Pham Minh Tri wrote:
>>
>>>I see that dual computers are expensive, not easy to own and still limited in
>>>power of computing.
>>>
>>>I wonder how good / possible if we use all computers in a LAN for chess
>>>computing. LANs are very popular and the numbers of computers could be hundreds.
>>>Even though a LAN is not effective as a dual circuit, but the bigger number of
>>>processors could help and break the limit.
>>>
>>>What do you think?
>>
>>When you search a chesstree, a lot of times you come into parts of tree that you
>>have searched before. You either don't want to search this part again ( you have
>>searched it deep enough before ) or you want to have the best move from the
>>previous search. Hashtables do exactly this.
>>
>>In a LAN (or a cluster) you don't share this hashtable and therefor are
>>searching the same tree (or parts of it ) time and time again. If you count the
>>number of nodes searched per second it's a linear speedup but effectively it's
>>useless. You have to add a lot of computers before you get any real speedup,
>>specially in the endgame.
>>
>>cheers,
>>
>>Tony
>
>
>This is not necessarily true.  Several programs have distributed the hash table
>across network nodes.  It requires small changes to the basic search algorithm,
>but a distributed hash table is not only doable, it has been done more than
>once.
>
>I will probably do this in the distributed Crafty when I do it...

I guess sharing the first x ply on a 1 or 10 Gb network will work, but I don't
think you can use the normal dynamic tree splitting. I gues you have to split at
a static depth ( decided in the first search ) ?

Just to get an impression. How many single Xeons do you think you'll need to get
the same speedup you get on a quad Xeon ? After that, does it scale ?

cheers,

Tony



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