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Subject: odd multithreaded search behavior--explanation?

Author: Tom Kerrigan

Date: 23:49:55 05/25/00


I've been writing a multithreaded program. I'm running on 1 processor but my
program splits into 4 threads. So far, the threads don't communicate in any way,
so searches take exactly 4 times as long (not counting some overhead).

But this evening I added a shared hash table, and now the threads=4 program is
only slightly slower (in terms of NPS and nodes/ply) than the threads=1 program.

Is this some sort of mistake? I tried for almost an hour to prove that something
flakey is going on, but it seems to really go 4 times faster, even though the
threads don't communicate (except for the hash table). The PVs and scores that
the programs spit out are exactly the same, and the threads seem to be sharing
the work equally.

Could this be some sort of side effect from running on 1 processor?

Thanks for any comments.

-Tom



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