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Subject: Re: Speedup?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 09:25:37 09/06/02

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On September 06, 2002 at 08:14:31, Slater Wold wrote:

>On September 06, 2002 at 01:41:25, Dave Gomboc wrote:
>
>>On September 05, 2002 at 22:37:18, Slater Wold wrote:
>>
>>>On September 05, 2002 at 21:33:40, Dann Corbit wrote:
>>>
>>>>On September 05, 2002 at 21:29:09, martin fierz wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On September 05, 2002 at 21:18:42, Slater Wold wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>Any comments/thoughts/ideas/suggestions welcome.
>>>>>
>>>>>great stuff slater!
>>>>>what i'd like to see is not only an average speedup (defined as time ratio, not
>>>>>nps ratio - i think that time ratio is what counts) as you give, but rather a
>>>>>list of all 300 speedups you observed, so we can see how the values are
>>>>>distributed (you gave 2 extreme examples) - or you can just give us the standard
>>>>>error on the speedup. what would also be interesting is if you reran the 2 CPU
>>>>>test (maybe more than once....), and recomputed the average, and looked how
>>>>>variable the average speedup is over such a large number of test positions. i'd
>>>>>think that at least the average should be fairly stable, but even that seems to
>>>>>be unclear...
>>>>
>>>>By what means are you limiting the search?
>>>>
>>>>Did you set time in seconds or depth in plies or what?  It will make a very big
>>>>difference on how we might interpret the results.
>>>>
>>>>Hash tables can share hits and mask speedup.
>>>>
>>>>Timed searches can suffer from the same effect.
>>>>
>>>>Depth in ply searches are probably the most reliable comparisons, but it is
>>>>impossible to know which ply level is sensible since some problems may take
>>>>weeks to reach ten plies and others may reach 32 plies in a few seconds.
>>>>
>>>>In short, the real difficulty here is designing the experiment.  Quite frankly,
>>>>I don't know the best way to proceed.
>>>
>>>I understand what you're getting out, but I do not agree.  Simply because the
>>>definition of "relative speedup" is "the ratio of the
>>>serial run time of a parallel application for solving a problem on a
>>>single processor, to the time taken by the same parallel application
>>>to solve the same problem on n processors".  It's all about "run time" and less
>>>about "run parameters".  IMO.
>>>
>>>As long as both runs were using the *same exact* settings, I think all would be
>>>fair.
>>>
>>>
>>>Also, I simply used 'st 60' in Crafty.  A *lot* of positions were thrown out
>>>because a.) they were solved at root or b.) the search time was less than 60
>>>seconds.
>>
>>Don't you want to be doing something like 'sd 10' and computing
>>time(2cpu)/time(1cpu)?
>>
>>Dave
>
>*I* don't think so.  Because the classic definition of "relative speedup" is
>based on runtime.  Not depth.


Dave's point is that sd=n is the _easiest_ way to get runtime data.

Search to a fixed depth on 1 cpu, then to the same fixed depth on 2
cpus, and you have _perfect_ timing data to compute the speedup...  Both
searched to the same depth, traversed the same tree, etc...




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