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Subject: Re: Questions on dual machines

Author: Slater Wold

Date: 22:52:04 11/20/01

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On November 21, 2001 at 00:30:15, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On November 20, 2001 at 21:58:57, Slater Wold wrote:
>
>>On November 20, 2001 at 21:50:32, Uri Blass wrote:
>>
>>>On November 20, 2001 at 15:37:39, Slater Wold wrote:
>>>
>>>>On November 20, 2001 at 11:25:50, Gordon Rattray wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>[snip]
>>>>>
>>>>>Thanks for the helpful info!
>>>>>
>>>>>>This is the speedup I see:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Crafty 1.89x
>>>>>>Junior 7 1.81x
>>>>>>Deep Fritz 1.31x
>>>>>>Deep Shredder 1.81x
>>>>>
>>>>>This is a surprising and disappointing efficiency for Deep Fritz.  So, when
>>>>>playing on ICC, do you consider Deep Junior 7 to be your strongest option?  I'm
>>>>>assuming that if you have, e.g. Gambit Tiger, then Junior's SMP capability will
>>>>>give it a significant edge when using your dual, since GT is non-SMP.
>>>>>
>>>>>Gordon
>>>>
>>>>I thought so too.  Deep Fritz SMP code is broken somewhere.  That's why I
>>>>laughed when I heard it was going to be on an 8-way box.  It would have run like
>>>>crap.  Unless Frans fixed it.
>>>
>>>The question for the match against kramnik is the speed up that they get on long
>>>time control and not in blitz.
>>>I do not know how people got the numbers of speedup for Crafty,Fritz ,Junior and
>>>Shredder
>>
>>A 900mhz 8-way box is not going to be impressive with DF.  Not the NPS anyway.
>>
>>And those are all MY numbers.  Run on my 2x1.4Ghz.
>>
>>>I think that the way to compare is comparing times and not nodes.
>>
>>I know it's not.  You can *NOT* compare solutions with SMP machines.  The
>>branching is SO random, and so unpredicible, that I have found solutions in 10
>>seconds and not been able to find the same solution in 10 hours.  It's the
>>beauty of SMP.
>>
>>>You need to take a test suite from positions when the program changes it's mind
>>>after some minutes and comparing times.
>>
>>No.  Won't prove anything.  Say it takes 10 minutes to find on 1 CPU, it might
>>take 30 seconds to find on 2 CPU's.
>>
>>>If the numbers are not based on similiar test then my opinion is that they mean
>>>nothing.
>>
>>They were based on something.  Program A does 1M nps with 1 CPU.  Program A does
>>1.81M nps with 2 CPU's.  That means Program A's speedup is 1.81.
>
>No..No..NOOOOO!
>
>NPS has _nothing_ to do with speedup.  Here are three example runs...
>
>
>1cpu:  time: 53  nps:  328K
>2cpu:  time: 28  nps:  626K
>4cpu:  time: 16  nps: 1162K
>
>if you use time to compute the 2/4 cpu speedup, you get
>
>1.89 for 2 processors
>3.31 for 4 processors
>
>if you use nps, you get
>
>1.90 for 2 processors
>3.54 for 4 processors

Well, for all intended purposes, that's not really a *major* difference.

But I believe you.  I will do it this way from now on.  :)

>NPS is the wrong thing to use because an SMP program will _always_ search
>more nodes than a pure sequential program for a given position, except for
>rare anomalies.  IE on a machine with no memory bandwidth bottleneck, Crafty's
>NPS is roughly 4X faster with 4 cpus, but it averages just over 3x faster if
>you look at the clock to see how long it takes to find a key move at a specific
>depth, or how long it takes to complete a search to a specific depth.
>
>Ignore NPS and _only_ use the time to solution or time to depth to compare
>speeds.  Anything else will produce wildly wrong numbers.
>
>
>>
>>>Testing it takes time and you need at least some hours of testing before getting
>>>an estimate for the speedup (not in blitz).
>>
>>These were SEVERAL SEVERAL tests I ran.  Positions were usually looked at for no
>>less than 1 hour.
>>
>>>Uri



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