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Subject: Re: What is the Fastest Hardware that Crafty and other's Can run on?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 14:55:38 09/07/01

Go up one level in this thread


On September 07, 2001 at 14:14:54, Gregor Overney wrote:

>On September 07, 2001 at 09:49:47, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On September 07, 2001 at 01:23:35, Joshua Lee wrote:
>>
>>>Recently in a response to my post about TYPP test set i was saying that someone
>>>can get a faster computer and that's not what Correspondence is about etc  blah
>>>blah
>>>
>>>Well i mentioned the DEC Alpha with 512 Cpu's
>>>but apparently crafty and other programs will not work on this.
>>>What is the fastest system for Ferret or Crafty or any onther program that can
>>>be run on these unix type systems?
>>>
>>>What about Dual booting Something like this ? Deep Fritz only uses 8 cpu's what
>>>about other "Deep Programs"?  What is the Ecentric Wealthy Chessplayers options
>>>here?  What about the Quad 800Mhz Itanium ?
>>>
>>>Thankyou
>>
>>
>>I can only speak for Crafty.  It can run on any platform that is SMP.  It
>>won't (currently) run on message passing architectures like the cluster of
>>alphas you mentioned.  The largest number of processors I have tested with
>>was 32.  But there is no real limit in that regard, just so the machine is
>>based on shared memory and not message passing.
>
>If I remember correctly, Cray Blitz was running on an X-MP with 2 or more CPUs.
>Since this system is not using SMP (right?), you still have code that could run
>on non-SMP-based super computers.
>\



All the Cray machines (except for the T3 alpha-based ones) are fully SMP.
The XMP, the YMP, the C90 and the T90 were all shared memory, fully SMP
machines.




>Do you plan to update/revive Cray Blitz for those machines or change Crafty? The
>reason I am asking is that SMP has to share its memory space while other
>architectures do not suffer under the limitations of accessing the same memory
>blocks with multiple CPUs but can dedicate their fullest potential to their own
>memory sub-system. For chess this might be a great improvement. No?
>
>Gregor





No.  Too much needs to be shared, which is why the message-passing machines
don't do as well as SMP machines.  Message passing is a real challenge in the
context of chess and alpha/beta searching with global hash tables.



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