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Subject: Re: Difference between Winborad and UCI protocol (Cilk vs pthreads?)

Author: Keith Evans

Date: 11:06:31 04/23/02

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On April 23, 2002 at 12:12:17, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On April 23, 2002 at 04:17:39, Sune Fischer wrote:
>
>>On April 23, 2002 at 04:10:09, Daniel Clausen wrote:
>>
>>>On April 23, 2002 at 03:39:01, Martin Bauer wrote:
>>>
>>>>Hello,
>>>>
>>>>can someone help mem with these two questions:
>>>>
>>>> - Is winboard comunication done by stdin/out with plain text commands,
>>>> as in UCI?
>>>
>>>I don't know about UCI, but winboard/xboard communication works with stdin/out
>>>and plain text commands.
>>>
>>>
>>>> - Must in winboard the engine be able to listen stdin even while thinking?
>>>
>>>Well, if you want to react to commands like "force move" or "new game" while
>>>you're thinking you better listen. :) Of course you don't have to..
>>>
>>>My engine has its own thread for listening. It's my feeling that a good design
>>>here is easier when using threads. YMMV.
>>>
>>>HTH
>>>
>>>Sargon
>>
>>Is there a "quick" tutorial on how to use threads?
>>A small piece of code would be real nice :)
>>
>>I did it once with pthreads in linux, but did not do anything fancy, it was all
>>on local variables that didn't need any volatile stuff.
>>
>>-S.
>
>
>Do a google search on "Posix Threads".  You should find a couple of online
>tutorials.  If you download the pthreads package for linux (this is now a
>standard part of linux but the package is still lying around) you will get
>a few sample programs, plus a couple of tutorials you can read.  I use these
>in the parallel programming course I teach, they are good enough for that...

Does anybody outside of MIT use Cilk for parallel programming? Especially
for writing SMP chess programs?

What would be the advantages/disadvantages of using Cilk versus using pthreads?
Is the main disadvantage that it would restrict you to certain platforms?

It looked like there were some nice profiling tools in Cilk so that you
could predict the performance of your program with carying number of
processors, and this would seem to be much more difficult to do with pthreads.
It also just looked easier to use in general.

Since you teach a course on parallel programming you must have considered
covering Cilk, so it would be interesting to hear your opinion.

Regards,
Keith



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