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Subject: Re: Is there no future for Dedicated Chess-playing Machines?

Author: Dann Corbit

Date: 18:12:17 06/21/02

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On June 21, 2002 at 20:44:55, Keith Evans wrote:

>On June 21, 2002 at 20:15:43, Dann Corbit wrote:
>
>>On June 21, 2002 at 18:48:53, Keith Evans wrote:
>>[snip]
>>>Just a quick note - when I looked into Cilk a little while back it looked like
>>>they were more into SMP systems now (probably because they were more available
>>>to them and performed better) and weren't supporting AMP in their latest
>>>releases. I thought that Cilk was pretty slick though, and even ran a few
>>>programs on an SMP box running Linux. Unfortunately as far as I know they don't
>>>make the source to their chess program available. If I'm wrong about any of
>>>this, then please post details.
>>
>>From:
>>http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk/index.html
>>
>>We find this:
>>"1999 World Computer Chess Championship
>>Cilkchess competed in the 1999 World Computer Chess Championship, June 14-20,
>>1999 in Paderborn, Germany. Cilkchess was written in Cilk-5, and ran on a
>>256-processor SGI Origin 2000 at NASA Ames."
>>
>>
>>From:
>>http://supertech.lcs.mit.edu/cilk/FAQ/section1.html#whatiscilk
>>
>>We find this:
>>"Question 1.1. What is Cilk?
>>Cilk is a language for multithreaded parallel programming based on ANSI C. Cilk
>>is designed for general-purpose parallel programming, but it is especially
>>effective for exploiting dynamic, highly asynchronous parallelism, which can be
>>difficult to write in data-parallel or message-passing style. Cilk has been
>>developed since 1994 by the Supercomputing Technologies Group at the MIT
>>Laboratory for Computer Science. Cilk has been used for research, teaching, and
>>for coding applications such as a virus shell assembly simulator and three chess
>>programs."
>
>But how about?
>
>"The 256-processor SGI Origin 2000 is based on breakthrough ccNUMA
>(cache-coherent non-uniform memory access) architecture"
>
>"Question 1.6. Does Cilk run on networks of workstations?
> Cilk-5.3 does not run on distributed-memory machines"
>
>This sounds a lot different (and more expensive) than clustering to me. Maybe I
>made a terminolgy error with AMP? Isn't ccNUMA basically a form of SMP?

No.
http://searchsystemsmanagement.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid20_gci212678,00.html

Allow me to highlight a salient part of the quote above:
"... but it is especially effective for exploiting dynamic, highly asynchronous
parallelism ..."



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