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Subject: Re: More on the "bad math" after an important email...

Author: Tony Werten

Date: 10:27:30 09/04/02

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On September 04, 2002 at 12:48:32, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On September 04, 2002 at 11:47:39, Tony Werten wrote:
>
>>On September 04, 2002 at 10:33:41, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On September 04, 2002 at 03:31:19, Tony Werten wrote:
>>>
>>>>On September 03, 2002 at 18:03:14, Gian-Carlo Pascutto wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>However reasonable your explanations may be, the gist of your DTS article
>>>>>and the most important thing for comparison were the speedup numbers. After
>>>>>what we discovered and what you just posted, it is clear that they are
>>>>>based on very shaky foundations.
>>>>
>>>>I must be missing something. The only thing I see wrong with the speedup numbers
>>>>is the way they are calculated.
>>>>
>>>>Since time was measured in miliseconds ie 3 significant numbers after the dot,
>>>>the speedup should have been given in 3 significant numbers behind the dot as
>>>>well.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>Just a note.  I am not sure where this "millisecond" stuff comes from.  But in
>>>Cray Blitz, we only kept time to the nearest second, as produced by the Cray
>>>library system call.
>>
>>So the speedup was calculated a different way and from that speedup the
>>solutiontime was calculated. Unfortunately the solutiontime was in
>>milliseconds,suggesting a high precision and the speedup factor only in tenths
>>giving the strang looking "precision" of 2.000 or 1.900 for anyone calculating
>>it the normal way from the tables.
>>
>>OK at least I understand what it's all about now. Not sure if I care though.
>
>I'm lost now.  Where are you seeing "milliseconds in the DTS article"???

Sorry, my mistake. In Holland ( and prabably more countries ) a "," is used as a
decimal separator, and a "." for thousands. I used them correct a few lines
above but when reading the table I went wrong. ( I already thought the table was
sloppy since you forgot the 0, in a few places :)

Tony

>
>Perhaps you are making a bad assumption because the one processor numbers are
>so big?  those are _seconds_.  Which is why I mentioned in the paper that this
>was a _huge_ computational project to complete.  :)
>
>But so far as I recall, all times were in seconds.  that is all Cray Blitz
>ever displayed.
>
>I always rounded speedups to .x because that was simply the way everyone
>else reported the same sort of data.  And with the variance in times between
>runs on the same position, even that .1 is a bit silly...  It would probably
>be "saner" to use three fractions and leave it at that, 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4,
>as that comes closer to covering the "jitter" in the speedup data.
>
>Hope that helps clear things up.  If I said milliseconds somewhere in the
>article, I hope it was in the context of overhead or something, and not
>related to raw search times.  Otherwise I certainly misstated something.  I
>did notice a microsecond reference but it was in relation to memory conflicts
>or something, and there the hardware performance monitor I used did give time
>down to the nanosecond (actually in terms of clock cycles) level...
>
>But not for any search times or speedups...
>
>>
>>Tony
>>



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