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Subject: Re: MP engines

Author: Mridul Muralidharan

Date: 07:58:18 12/26/03

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Comments inline ....

On December 25, 2003 at 10:12:11, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On December 25, 2003 at 04:55:44, Mridul Muralidharan wrote:
>
>>Hi all,
>>
>>  I would like to know the list of MP engines that are currently active -
>>amateur , commercial , and private (not in-development efforts :) )
>>
>>The list that I could come up with was :
>>
>>Baron (upto 2 or even higher ? )
>>Brutus
>>Crafty
>>Diep
>>Fritz
>>Junior
>>Shredder
>>Sjeng
>>SOS (or is it ParSOS ?)
>>
>>Of these , which all can scale > 8 procs ?
>>Diep I know for sure.
>>SOS also I think.
>>What about rest ?
>
>Crafty certainly does, given the right kind of architecture.  I've run it
>on 32-way boxes for example.


Which is this kind of hardware ?
I have not seen any results of crafty on a 32 or higher proc box ....
Could you give me some link, etc for this ?
(And I dont have any data of cray blitz also ...)
Thanks


>
>>
>>
>>Of these which all are NUMA compatible.
>>Latest crafty , Diep.
>>Anyone else ?
>
>Be careful.  There is NUMA and there is NUMA.

Hmm - fundamentals of design - design for generic case - specialise for specific
case :)
So if design is to support numa - then max yu need is tweaks for specific
hardware - but not much else changes.
If you design for smp and try to extend for numa - you are in for shit !
But then , it is pointless to get into this discussion again - we already had
this before : You will not agree that crafty design is not good for NUMA and I
will not agree to the contrary :)

>Current Crafty supports NUMA
>under windows, which pretty well limits it to Intel and AMD machines.

I could not get crafty to work on aix or irix - otherwise could have given this
new numa code in crafty a shot at a 16 or 32 box machine .... but from looks of
it - and this is a very personal opinion backed with zero data - it wont scale -
atleast nowhere close to your formula given below :)


> Diep
>is running on SGI, which is not particularly compatible with anybody else.

I am sure that diep scales on any other numa platform - remember - teras runs
irix which is pretty similar to linux.

But this is for Vincent to comment on - not me ! :)


>I have an experimental NUMA version of Crafty, but it is not well-checked out
>yet (it is a linux version using libnuma for the NUMA stuff, but linux kernels
>are very spotty in their NUMA support to date.)
>

Too true ! Linux is yet to get there ... hopefully next year mid it should be
pretty good and stable.


>Eventually Crafty will support NUMA on linux and windows.  Others may be added
>if time permits and hardware becomes available for testing.
>

Great ! and I assume - with only "tweaks" to get it to work ?!! ;)

>
>
>
>>
>>Can anyone provide with what is the usual speedup on a Quad for these engines -
>>say a typical middle game position ?
>
>My formula for speedup is this:
>
>speedup = 1 + (ncpus - 1) * .7
>


Thanks for this - do you have an upper limit by which this formula stops being
accurate due to diminishing returns ?
Also , how much depth does crafty needs to achieve before it starts giving this
kindof speedup ?
For mess , in the first few plies speedup sucks ....


>IE for a quad, that gives 3.1x which is a pretty good approximation.
>
>
>
>
>
>>(In case you need a machine config to base numbers on - what about a Quad Xeon 3
>>GHz 3 Gig RAM running OS of your choice).
>
>CPU speed really doesn't matter so long as there are no hardware bottlenecks
>to deal with.  IE my formula above works just as well on my quad pentium-pro
>200 as it does on my quad xeon 700 and my dual xeon (with hyperthreading on)
>2.8ghz.  It also fit the quad opteron 2ghz machine just fine also.

This was given just so that I dont get flames like "What hardware" from people
who know almost nothing about parallel programming ;)


Thanks for your comments

Mridul

>
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>>
>>Thanks in advance
>>Mridul



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