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Subject: Re: Multi-threading issues

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 09:28:46 11/10/02

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On November 09, 2002 at 23:03:07, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>I don't have my dissertation handy, but PVS got better than 1.3 for everyone
>that ever tried it and published results in the JICCA.  IE if I just split at
>the root only, the first version of Cray Blitz got > 1.3 on average using two
>cpus in 1983 at the WCCC.  In fact, 1.5 was a good average.  Unfortunately,
>four processors barely improved that so that I took Monty Newborn's ande Murray
>Campbell's suggestion and implemented the PVS algorithm.  If you do it right,
>there is no reason it won't produce reasonable speedups for 2, but with all
>processors locked together at any specific node, going beyond 2 hurts,
>especially in the endgame.
>
>I'll locate and report my original 2-cpu and 4-cpu PVS numbers when I get to
>the office, they are in my dissertation.

I suspect the data may be outdated. PVS wants situations where you can
split so all moves take roughly the same amount of work, or at the very
least situations where one move does *not* take more time then all other
combined.

Nowadays most programs use nullmove heavily, and have a lot of extensions.
If you add in forward pruning and selective searches, the situation gets even
worse.

I found that when using PVS I had trouble keeping 2 cpus busy, because
I always ended up with one move that took way more time to search than
the others. If your loading factor (load you can place on both cpus)
is < 1.5, then you are never going to get a good speedup, so I had to
drop PVS.

Your EPVS presents a solution for this, but when I considered how to
implement it in my program, I decided that it would have about the
same complexity as doing a simplified DTS implementation, where the
latter had much better guarantees to generate a good speedup. So I
chose that route.

--
GCP



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