Author: J. Wesley Cleveland
Date: 09:28:39 07/22/03
Go up one level in this thread
On July 22, 2003 at 08:07:18, Gerd Isenberg wrote:
>On July 21, 2003 at 15:35:17, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>
>>On July 18, 2003 at 23:45:16, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On July 18, 2003 at 21:58:18, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>>>
>>>>On July 18, 2003 at 21:17:14, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On July 18, 2003 at 15:21:35, J. Wesley Cleveland wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On July 17, 2003 at 18:25:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>On July 17, 2003 at 17:35:33, Dieter Buerssner wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>[snip]
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>I cannot find any randomness in the reads of lm-bench (I downloaded latest
>>>>>>>>stable source today, not the experimental version, available, too). If it would
>>>>>>>>do random reads, it would have no way to avoid the problem with the TLBs you
>>>>>>>>explained.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>4M pages solves it for at least 250mb worth of RAM. But then again, _no_ chess
>>>>>>>program depends on purely random memory accesses to blow out the TLB. The only
>>>>>>>truly random accesses I do are the regular hashing and pawn hashing, which
>>>>>>>both total to significantly less than the total nodes I search. Which means
>>>>>>>the TLB penalty is not even 1% of my total run time. Probably closer to
>>>>>>>.01% - .05%.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>I ignore that.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Why do you think it is that low? I get ~20-30% of nodes have hash probes with
>>>>>>crafty.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>Look at the code.
>>>>I not only looked at the code. I *instrumented it*. I won't have complete
>>>>results until Monday, but it appears that crafty spends 3-5% of its total time
>>>>inside hashprobe on my (slow) machine and a prefetch could reduce that by about
>>>>half.
>>>>
>>>>>Crafty probes memory _once_ for a hash probe. That
>>>>>introduces a memory access penalty once per node in the basic search,
>>>>>less than once per node in the q-search (I only probe phash there and I
>>>>>don't probe it but about 25% of the q-search nodes I visit).
>>>>
>>>>If you had read whai I wrote, you would see I said crafty does a hash probe
>>>>20-30% of its total nodes.
>>>
>>>OK. I clearly mis-read what you meant. the 20-30% was eye-catching as that
>>>is a pretty common hash hit percentage as well...
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>As a result, you get less than one probe per node searched. A node searched
>>>>>requires something on the order of 3000-5000 instructions. What percentage
>>>>>of that 3K-5K instruction timing is that single hash probe? Almost zero.
>>>>
>>>>Except that a fast machine may do these 3-5K instructions in <1usec. A cache
>>>>miss + a TLB miss may take 300-400 ns. I would not call 30% almost 0.
>>>
>>>You are missing my point. In the position(s) you tested, you saw 20-30%
>>>hash probes. That means one probe for every 3-5 nodes. At 1M nodes
>>>per second, that is 200K-300K probes per second. If you measure the
>>>time spent in searching a single node, multiply that by 3-5X, then compare
>>>that to the hash probe time, the time spent probing the hash table is low.
>>>
>>>Note that your 5% is _not_ the total time used to probe the table. It is
>>>the time to probe the table, and do it _twice_ although the second probe
>>>doesn't have any memory access penalty associated with it in most cases.
>>>
>>>So a big percent of that 5% is doing the actual work done in HashProbe(),
>>>rather than being all memory access penalty...
>>
>>I ran some tests on my slow (450 Mhz) machine. Hash was set to 192Mb. The test
>>was 21 middle-game positions and ran for nearly 1 hour. Crafty got between 125k
>>and 230k nps. Crafty spent 3.6% of total time in HashProbe. I added the
>>following code just before the call to RepetitionCheck() in search.c (slightly
>>modified from the code in hash.c). Note that the code is basically a no-op as
>>all variables are local.
>>
>>{
>> static BITBOARD word1;
>> BITBOARD temp_hashkey;
>> HASH_ENTRY *htable;
>>/*
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>>| |
>>| first, compute the initial hash address and choose |
>>| which hash table (based on color) to probe. |
>>| |
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>>*/
>>
>> temp_hashkey=(wtm) ? HashKey : ~HashKey;
>> htable=trans_ref_a+((int) temp_hashkey&hash_maska);
>> word1=htable->word1;
>>}
>>
>>Now crafty spends 2.8% of its time in HashProbe.
>
>Hi Wesley,
>
>that's interesting, it seems that preloading decreases the hash-latency.
>May be prefetching with Athlons's/Opteron's/P4's PREFETCHNTA, (bypassing
>L2-Cache) is even better.
>
>Gerd
I'm sure it would be better. My code doesn't make it run any faster, it just
shows that the delay due to memory access is significant.
>
>
>{
> static BITBOARD word1;
> BITBOARD temp_hashkey;
> HASH_ENTRY *htable;
>/*
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>| |
>| first, compute the initial hash address and choose |
>| which hash table (based on color) to probe. |
>| |
> ----------------------------------------------------------
>*/
>
> temp_hashkey=(wtm) ? HashKey : ~HashKey;
> htable=trans_ref_a+((int) temp_hashkey&hash_maska);
>#ifdef _DOPREFETCH
> __asm mov eax, [htable]; // get the pointer
> __asm PREFETCHNTA [eax]; // fetch to L1-cache, bypassing L2-Cache
>#else
> word1=htable->word1;
>#endif
>}
>
>some additional notes from:
>
>"AMD Athlon™ Processor x86 Code Optimization Guide"
>
>Prefetching versus Preloading
>
>In code that uses the block prefetch technique as described in
>“Optimizing Main Memory Performance for Large Arrays” on page 66, a standard
>load instruction is the best way to prefetch data. But in other situations, load
>instructions may be able to mimic the functionality of prefetch instructions,
>but they do not offer the same performance advantage.Prefetch instructions only
>update the cache line in the L1/L2 cache and do not update an architectural
>register. This uses one less register compared to a load instruction. Prefetch
>instructions also do not cause
>normal instruction retirement to stall. Another benefit of prefetching versus
>preloading is that the prefetching instructions can retire even if the load data
>has not arrived yet. A regular load used for preloading will stall the machine
>if it gets to the bottom of the fixed-issue reorder buffer (part of the
>Instruction Control Unit) and the load data has not arrived yet. The load is
>"blocking" whereas the prefetch is "non-blocking."
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