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Subject: Re: Amir should use the Quad 1.9 Ghz instead of the 8x 1.6 !

Author: Matthew Hull

Date: 20:31:19 01/29/03

Go up one level in this thread


On January 29, 2003 at 23:20:11, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On January 29, 2003 at 12:06:50, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>Bob let me explain to you. DIEP is written for machines which have a bit slower
>latency for global memory accesses. whereas the world champs 2002 version wasn't
>like that and would probably act like crafty on that 8 processor, the end of
>august 2002 versions and further are using a new type of parallellism which
>doesn't need much locking. Each processor takes care of itself without hurting
>bandwidth while searching too much.
>
>There is no dead slow global locks which is killing the 8 processor thing of
>course.
>
>therefore it works great for example at cc-NUMA machines and all types of Xeon
>machines.


Wow dude.  Impressive.  Could you supply some time-to-ply benchmarks for Diep on
8-way Xeon vis-a-vis 4-way Xeon.  That would refute the proffessor like nothing
else.

Sincerely,
Matt


>
>Now you have some examples of software written for fast latency shared memory
>machines and then claim the thing is slower because the software isn't written
>for such types of machines?
>
>That already should give you the answer. Writing parallel programs is 1 thing.
>Writing something that works well without inventing numbers yourself is another
>thing.
>
>
>>On January 29, 2003 at 11:38:37, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>>On January 28, 2003 at 10:33:15, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>On January 28, 2003 at 09:07:35, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On January 28, 2003 at 03:33:44, Mig Greengard wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>According to the tech I talked with, Amir and Shay were testing both machines
>>>>>>before the match to see which one they would use. To my knowledge it wasn't
>>>>>>decided until a day or two before the match. Obviously there isn't a big
>>>>>>difference in performance.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Saludos, Mig
>>>>>>http://www.chessninja.com
>>>>>
>>>>>thanks.
>>>>>
>>>>>DIEP onto the 8 processor 1.6 would be running 16 processes and speed would
>>>>>be about expressed in K7:
>>>>>  8 x 1.6 Ghz / 1.4 = 9 Ghz
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>No it wouldn't.  You haven't tried an 8-way intel box yet.  It doesn't scale
>>>>nearly as well as the 2-way and 4-way intel boxes do.  The chipset for
>>>>supporting 8 cpus is simply not very good...
>>>
>>>DIEP isn't demanding much bandwidth Bob in case you missed it, it works
>>>great on a cc-NUMA machine too.
>>
>>It demands _enough_ bandwidth.  My comment wasn't only about "crafty" It was
>>about the 8-way boxes in general.  I ran on a dell 8450, with 8 700mhz xeon
>>processors, and it was about 1.5X faster than my box.  And again, _not_ with
>>Crafty.  I ran 8 copies of the same thing on the 8450, 4 copies on the quad,
>>and compared the total run times.  The 8450 was only about 50% faster when it
>>should be 100% based on clock...
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>>The 8-way box using the same clock speed for the processors will only be about
>>>>1.5X faster than the 4-way box, and that doesn't count parallel search overhead
>>>>at all.
>>>
>>>That's not true. It's 8 times faster for good software. Of course there is
>>>algorithmic loss but there is no sequential loss unless the software sucks,
>>>to say it rude.
>>
>>Have you ever run on one?  Of course not.  I have.  So your "that's not true"
>>is simply nonsense...  There are _plenty_ of good benchmarks that can be used
>>to draw conclusions about the 8-way memory bottleneck problem.
>>
>>It _might_ be 8x faster if you can fit in the L2 cache (this machine had
>>2mb of L2 per processor compared to my 1mb on my quad 700).  But if you have
>>any memory bandwidth at all, it has a problem.  And a 8-probe hash table is
>>more than enough to highlight the problem.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>Doesn't say that it is easy to make software that can handle the latencies.
>>>
>>>It sure isn't easy to make a chessprogram that is having a good speedup
>>>(without a too big sequential loss first like Zugzwang which was slowed down
>>>first like 100 times or so in order to then have a decent speedup at like
>>>256 processors; 50% speedup even incredible much i would be *very* happy with
>>>around 15% already).
>>>
>>>But it is possible to make.
>>>
>>>DIEP is such a program that shows it can. DIEP runs like the sun on 8 cpu's
>>>(2 nodes quad SGI), even at the slowest partitions (slowest latency speeds
>>>are of course at the biggest partitions: 512 cpu partition).
>>>
>>>A 8 processor Xeon is hell for pc software like Fritz, Junior, Crafty, but it
>>>is very good for DIEP.
>>>
>>>Best regards,
>>>Vincent



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