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Subject: Re: Crafty and NUMA

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 20:23:18 09/01/03

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On September 01, 2003 at 09:39:55, Jeremiah Penery wrote:

>On September 01, 2003 at 06:09:48, Mridul Muralidharan wrote:
>
>>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 !!!
>
>The specific discussion was about Opteron machines up to 8 CPUs, which will all
>be contained in one node and have extremely low non-local memory latency.
>
>Any large (multi-node) SMP machine will have the same problem as NUMA with
>respect to inter-node latency.  SMP doesn't magically make node-to-node
>communication any faster.

Actually it does.  SMP means symmetric.

NUMA is _not_ symmetric.

Check out a Cray T932 with 32 processors, and a big crossbar.  There is
no NUMA-type latency issues there.  All memory is directly accessed by each
CPU with equal latency for _any_ word of memory for any processor...

>But in reality, almost nobody uses a machine that big, especially for chess.
>For any but the most extremely scalable architectures, there is significant
>diminishing returns when adding processors for chess playing.  I'd say that a
>very scalable 8-way SMP or NUMA (Opteron) machine will not be very much slower
>than even a 64-way Alpha/Itanium/xxx machine for chess.



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