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Subject: Re: Conclusion

Author: Mridul Muralidharan

Date: 01:58:51 12/27/03

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On December 26, 2003 at 19:29:57, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On December 26, 2003 at 18:40:57, Mridul Muralidharan wrote:
>
>>On December 26, 2003 at 16:13:26, Luis Smith wrote:
>>
>>>On December 26, 2003 at 15:34:43, Darren Rushton wrote:
>>>
>>>>>Actually what happens, is the 366 is SLOW.  And I mean SLOW.
>>>>
>>>>I don't intend to be controversial here, but the conclusion I draw from your
>>>>results is that Shredder 7 is such a brilliant program it is almost a match for
>>>>the one of the better amateur programs on hardware that's almost 10 times
>>>>slower.
>>>>
>>>>Regards,
>>>>
>>>>Darren
>>>
>>>I think you're missing the point of these experiments.  Some people here were
>>>saying that Crafty isn't a world contender.  Bob could get much better hardware
>>>than most of the commercials.  He mentioned something about a 32 way box.  Can
>>>you imagine the speed of Crafty on something like that?
>>>
>>>I don't think anyone can count Crafty out after this experiment.
>>
>>You also need to get decent speedup on those boxes :)
>>And I hope it is not a shared bus 32 proc bus ;)
>>
>>A 4/8 cpu opteron against a 32 proc alpha is not fair - for crafty - it would
>>lose again against say shredder or fritz.
>>
>>Mridul
>
>
>I'm not sure what you are saying in the above?  The 4-8cpu opteron will not
>run programs well without some work.  I've already done it.  Just dropping
>in deep fritz or something similar will not produce great results, from past
>experience.  As far as 32 proc alpha, it depends on the box.  I got reasonable
>scaling on the 32 cpu version I used last year at Compaq.

4 things are important here.

1) If deep fritz/shredder/etc gets released which supports quad/8 way opteron -
then it will be ported and tested. And the authors will ensure that there is a
decent speedup.
Dont tell me that they are never going to figure out how to get their program
working on a numa opteron box :) - Nalimov could have a good job at crafty - but
even other people would figure out what to do from their specs and docs.
And I have a suspicion that some already have ;)

2) The alpha proc has a disadvantage in latency and processing power w.r.t the
opteron - so it is never a 1:4 or 1:8 h/w advantage between the two machines -
much lower.
Also - what is crafty speedup here ? Any numbers ? What kind of machine is it ?
Shared bus ? - in which case you are dead due to bus contention.
numa ? - I thought you said crafty works only on windows and intel/amd. You have
crafty working for alpha also ?

3) A program scaling at 4 or 8 proc is going to be much higher than at 16 or 32.

4) Even with a 1:10 or 1:8 advantage crafty only barely manages to catch up or
beat these top order programs - so not much of a chance if they show up with the
above mentioned machines.

Mridul



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