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Subject: Re: Crafty and NUMA

Author: Mridul Muralidharan

Date: 03:09:48 09/01/03

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Hi Jeremiah,

  If you want crafty to get to work with a decent speedup on a 16 or 32 CPU
cc-numa where you have say 2 - 4 processors per node with a significant
inter-node latency (like most higher cpu numa boxes ?!)  , you will have to
ensure that the way you split , memory usage , etc is optimal - you dont want to
access a hash entry in proc 0 from proc 32 when the latency wil be in
milliseconds !!!

Hope you are appreciating the real world problems - not theoretical issues.
If you actually work on these boxes , you will appreciate the problems faced by
these developers more - using threads on such a box for parallelism , urggh !!

Regards
Mridul

PS : Forget getting crafty to work on the 500 CPU beast that Vincent is working
on without a total crafty rewrite ! The horrors Vincent must be facing is
unimaginable - the once he has already mentioned in this forum and I'm sure ,
the more horrible ones he may not have !

On August 30, 2003 at 10:40:03, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On August 29, 2003 at 23:41:32, Jeremiah Penery wrote:
>
>>On August 29, 2003 at 18:40:23, Mridul Muralidharan wrote:
>>
>>>I'm not sure of what/why Prof. Bob Hyatt may have made those comments. But to
>>>get a program like crafty to work properly in a numa machine will not be trivial
>>>- and it wont be tweaks , but something more.
>>
>>All multi-CPU Opteron machines are NUMA.  Crafty will work just fine in those.
>>It will not be theoretically optimal, but that also depends on the OS to help
>>with NUMA issues.
>
>The OS has to do very little for chessprograms. Just keep scheduling the same
>process at the same cpu and physically allocating local memory at that cpu's
>RAM.
>
>Of course for a lot of other services the OS has to do a lot different, yet in
>chessprograms we do not need it as most of us, except for example cilkchess,
>write their parallellism at a very low level.
>
>>>Duals , etc count as SMP machine not cc-numa which I was refering to.
>>Dual Opterons are NUMA.
>
>And soon all duals that we can afford will be.
>
>Best regards,
>Vincent



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