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Subject: Re: Anand comment about Deep Blue

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 11:19:55 01/16/00

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On January 16, 2000 at 10:33:08, Vincent Lejeune wrote:

>On January 15, 2000 at 11:27:10, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On January 15, 2000 at 08:31:26, David Blackman wrote:
>>
>>>On January 15, 2000 at 01:20:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>It is time for my next project. Today I finished the PO for a new beowulf
>>>>cluster machine here.  This machine will have 8 nodes, with each node being
>>>>a quad xeon 550mhz machine.  The nodes will be connected by a gigabit/sec
>>>>switch.  And no, it won't be crafty's permanent machine.  But look for it to
>>>>do some interesting matches on ICC later this year when I get to the
>>>>distributed search.  :)
>>>
>>>Bob Hyatt does distributed processing? That's something not many people
>>>expected.
>>
>>
>>I figured everyone knew I did this.  I had a distributed version of Cray
>>Blitz.
>>
>>
>>>
>>>Distributed processing is something not many programs have used well, or even at
>>>all. I think there was something called Sun Phoenix back around 1985? Was
>>>Shaeffer involved?
>>>
>>
>>
>>There was sun phoenix.  And cilkchess.  And Waycool.  And several others.
>>All running on "cubes" using message passing protocols.  It is doable.  DB
>>ran on a message-passing cluster (SP) don't forget.
>>
>>
>>
>>>And Deep Blue, but that thing had such an enormous amount of speed it is hard to
>>>say if the distributed processing was used well or not. I think Hsu published
>>>that he got 35x speedup with 100 cpus. I suspect that's not as easy to do as it
>>>sounds, but it also is not as good as you'd like.
>>>
>>>The few other examples haven't exactly set the world on fire. Bob Hyatt has been
>>>one of the people pointing out that efficient use of distributed processing is
>>>difficult or impossible.
>>>
>>>Bob was one of the first and still one of the most successful with small scale
>>>SMP (but maybe not for much longer ...). And Cray Blitz was probably the only
>>>program to make good use of a vector unit. Maybe after a bit of tuning and
>>>experimenting, we will see an efficient distributed processing chess program.
>>
>>
>>I hope so.  32 xeon processors offer a lot.  64 later this year will offer
>>more.  :)
>
>I'm just reading a news : Hitachi plans quick move to 32-way Itanium servers at
>http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000113S0014
>I have automatically make a mental association between CPU, computer chess,
>distributed power


Sounds interesting but I'll bet it will cost a fortune.  IE the 8xquad machines
is costing us about 120K total.  I'll bet that 32-way machine ends up at one
million or so...



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