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Subject: Re: Zappa Hardware Upgrade

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 19:45:43 12/25/05

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On December 24, 2005 at 13:11:10, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On December 23, 2005 at 13:26:42, Zappa wrote:
>
>As most people here do not realize very well what the machine is,
>here a short comparision.
>
>The only machine on the planet faster than this for chess, is NASA's
>10240 processor SGI machine which has partitions of 2048 processors.
>
>So basically this is the one fastest machine for chess.
>
>Let's do a small comparision with hydra. Hydra has 64 cpu's and each cpu
>delivers 3 Gflop. So that's about 0.192 Tflop for entire machine.
>
>This 1060 processor machine delivers 6.4 gflop a processor. So that's
>6.784 tflop on paper.


That is all interesting, and well-known.  And it has _absolutely_ nothing to do
with playing chess.  I don't do a single "FLOP" while searching a node.  I doubt
you do either.  So how fast the thing can do floating point operations is about
as important as how much the machine weighs...




>
>In reality Zappa uses from the machine 512 processors. 12 processors will be for
>i/o, a processor carrying a timer (timing goes central) and one to set coffee
>for you meanwhile another gets a fastfood meal for you.
>
>So he could use in theory 500 processors in Turino. 500 * 6.4 Gflop = 3.2 Tflop.
>
>Of course all that doesn't matter for practical search efficiency.
>
>Hydra loses shitloads to search efficiency, after initially winning some by
>hardware. Zappa has also big inefficiency of course at such a big machine.
>
>If i look at diep's speedup at this machine, Diep would be practical having a
>hardware advantage of factor 6 to a quad opteron dual core 2.4Ghz in world
>champs 2006.
>
>I expect Anthony to obtain something like that too.
>
>Vincent
>
>>So when I went to UIUC as a newly minted World Champion, they were interested
>>and after some negotiations I managed to procure some time on NCSA's Cobalt
>>supercomputer, an SGI Altix:
>>
>>http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/UserInfo/Resources/Hardware/SGIAltix/TechSummary/
>>
>>At Paderborn Zappa will run on 128 CPUs as a bit of a warmup; at Turino I hope
>>to use 512.  I haven't really had enough time to seriously optimize Zappa for
>>this machine, and I have been somewhat disappointed by the Itanium2 CPU, but the
>>results are still reasonably impressive.  For example:
>>
>>r1b2r2/p1q1ppk1/6p1/3p3p/7P/5P2/PPPQ2P1/2K1RB1R b - - 0 9
>>
>>1... Ra8-b8 2. g2-g4 h5xg4 3. h4-h5 Qc7-b6 4. b2-b3 Qb6-f6 5. Kc1-b1 Rf8-h8 6.
>>h5-h6 Kg7-g8 7. f3xg4 Bc8xg4 8. h6-h7 Kg8-f8 9. Qd2-h6 Kf8-e8 10. Bf1-d3 e7-e6
>> = (-0.49)      Depth: 17/45    00:03:37.11     5532448kN (25481 KN/s, 3558608
>>splits, 294631 aborts)
>>
>>r1b2rk1/pp3ppp/1nn1p3/q2pP3/2pP1P2/P1P2NPB/2PB3P/R2QK2R w KQ - 0 8
>>
>>1. Ke1-g1 Nc6-e7 2. Nf3-h4 Qa5-a4 3. Qd1-b1 Bc8-d7 4. Qb1-b2 Qa4-c6 5. Ra1-b1
>>Qc6-c7 6. Nh4-g2 Ra8-c8 7. Kg1-h1 Ne7-f5 8. Ng2-e3 Nf5xe3 9. Bd2xe3 Rf8-d8 10.
>>Rb1-a1
>> = (0.15)       Depth: 20/46    00:04:33.59     7300957kN (26686 KN/s, 6497504
>>splits, 503423 aborts)
>>
>>Single CPU Zappa on the I2 there gets about 300 knps, so that is an nps speedup
>>of 80-85.  I'll probably get a bit less in Paderborn, as this is essentially the
>>World Champs version of Zappa, and I've been busy de-optimizing it since :)
>>
>>This is really only 1-2 ply deeper than my quad, but wait until Turino when I've
>>had some time to optimize things a bit . . .
>>
>>anthony



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