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Subject: Re: How good to use a LAN for chess computing?

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 18:59:46 09/16/01

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On September 16, 2001 at 09:41:29, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On September 16, 2001 at 06:02:24, Tony Werten wrote:
>
>>On September 15, 2001 at 22:34:27, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On September 15, 2001 at 03:28:18, Tony Werten wrote:
>>>
>>>>On September 14, 2001 at 22:56:06, Pham Minh Tri wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>I see that dual computers are expensive, not easy to own and still limited in
>>>>>power of computing.
>>>>>
>>>>>I wonder how good / possible if we use all computers in a LAN for chess
>>>>>computing. LANs are very popular and the numbers of computers could be hundreds.
>>>>>Even though a LAN is not effective as a dual circuit, but the bigger number of
>>>>>processors could help and break the limit.
>>>>>
>>>>>What do you think?
>>>>
>>>>When you search a chesstree, a lot of times you come into parts of tree that you
>>>>have searched before. You either don't want to search this part again ( you have
>>>>searched it deep enough before ) or you want to have the best move from the
>>>>previous search. Hashtables do exactly this.
>>>>
>>>>In a LAN (or a cluster) you don't share this hashtable and therefor are
>>>>searching the same tree (or parts of it ) time and time again. If you count the
>>>>number of nodes searched per second it's a linear speedup but effectively it's
>>>>useless. You have to add a lot of computers before you get any real speedup,
>>>>specially in the endgame.
>>>>
>>>>cheers,
>>>>
>>>>Tony
>>>
>>>
>>>This is not necessarily true.  Several programs have distributed the hash table
>>>across network nodes.  It requires small changes to the basic search algorithm,
>>>but a distributed hash table is not only doable, it has been done more than
>>>once.
>>>
>>>I will probably do this in the distributed Crafty when I do it...
>>
>>I guess sharing the first x ply on a 1 or 10 Gb network will work, but I don't
>>think you can use the normal dynamic tree splitting. I gues you have to split at
>>a static depth ( decided in the first search ) ?
>
>
>
>That is not my intent.  Of course, I won't try to split at the deep levels in
>the tree that I split at now.  But for (say) the first 1/3 of the plies in the
>current search, splitting is certainly doable.  This will just be a tunable
>parameter that will have to be adjusted depending on the hardware and network
>speeds.
>
>
>
>
>>
>>Just to get an impression. How many single Xeons do you think you'll need to get
>>the same speedup you get on a quad Xeon ? After that, does it scale ?
>
>
>I can't imagine that this will be less than 50% effective.  Or, if we take deep
>blue as an example, no less than 30% effective. I would think that 8 cpus would
>be very close to the quad...
>

Bob, you're pretty optimistic here i think.

A quad xeon delivers 3.1

Now how many single xeons you need for 3.1, well you lose like 50% just
like that everywhere we still didn't talk about speedup. then you lose
another factor of 6 or so because you can't hash last few plies.

Now this factor of 6 is the biggest problem. the system time already isn't
the problem. So i would say 3.1 x 6 = 20 nodes at least.

O yeah and of course at least a 1.25 gigabit/s network. At a 100mbit
network i doubt one ever gets a positive speedup anyway

>
>
>
>
>>
>>cheers,
>>
>>Tony



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