Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: ASCI White vs. Deep Blue

Author: Lonnie Cook

Date: 15:32:47 09/23/01

Go up one level in this thread


On September 23, 2001 at 18:20:30, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On September 23, 2001 at 15:30:08, Lonnie Cook wrote:
>
>>* It weighs 106 tons
>>
>>* costs 110M for the unit itself (doesn't include the ungodly sum to run it
>>every day)
>>
>>* Has 8,192 IBM Power3 processors
>
>>* 12.3 trillion ops per sec.
>>
>>* took 28 tractor-trailer trucks to deliver
>>
>>this was the part that astounded me. It said it was 1,000 X's faster than Deep
>>Blue!!
>>
>>so we're talking about a machine that in theory could do 200,000,000,000 nps!!
>
>Noop.
>
>IBM power3 processors. i do not know what speed they run at. Let's guess
>they run at 375Mhz. Hehe , a cheated guess kind of.
>
>Now i have some numbers on these processors, but those are a few years old
>of course. These processors suck bigtime of course. NO one wants to run
>on 375Mhz processors nowadays. But well let's assume that at a stupid
>cluster which ASCI white is, that you can get a decent speedup.

Vin,
You're right as usual! I went here and checked all the specs:

http://www.llnl.gov/asci/platforms/white/hardware/#Config

>
>Now how fast do i run at 1 node? Well that's like 15k nodes a second.
>
>Still probably optimistic number of nodes a second.
>
>So at 8192 processors, from which you can perhaps use a 1000 at a time,
>I would get 15M nodes a second.
>
>Now that looks great, but that's of course on a CLUSTER. Speedup perhaps
>10%. 1.5M nodes a second effectively, but the bigger the depth the less
>the speedup gets as the branching factor will be worse, unless i accept
>that the thing first slows down at each processor (which is a likely
>approach) and pray that the latency is more than fast at this thing.
>
>So you sure outsearch deep blue by many plies, but not if a new deep
>blue would be pressed on a chip using nullmove and DDR-RAM at it.
>
>So you are not faster in NPS, but search improvements would let it
>search deeper. that still wouldn't make my DIEP faster on this machine
>than DB was in nodes a second.
>
>Of course DBs focus upon only getting the maximum number of NPS (that's
>how they advertised the thing. search depths have no commercial value)
>sure made it faster than what i would get on this machine.
>
>>Is this really so for those in the know with hardware and these types of
>>machines?



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.