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Subject: Re: SMP variability

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 07:14:18 09/05/02

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On September 05, 2002 at 02:31:19, Slater Wold wrote:

>On September 05, 2002 at 00:47:17, martin fierz wrote:
>
>>thanks, this is really interesting. i never realized that SMP searches could be
>>so variable in some positions and very stable in others.
>>actually, vincent might like this, because it's >2 speedup :-)
>>
>>aloha
>>  martin
>
>I have seen on my duals, more than once, an SMP program solve a problem in 3
>minutes.
>
>Then 2 hours later I try the same position and it solves it in 5 minutes.
>
>SMP is *way* to random in its branching to be what normal people call "stable".


I take that variability as "part of the pain".  But if you looked at the data
I gave Martin, there _is_ something that is very troubling.  In one of the
runs, two processors were actually _slower_ than one.  Granted that it is a
pathological type of position, but anytime two is slower than one gets my
attention in a big way.  Bruce once sent me a position where four were
1/10th as fast as one.  I fooled with that for a long time before understanding
it and improving the parallel search to fix it.




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