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Subject: Re: What's the difference between NUMA, SMP and MPI for chess?

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 05:59:24 04/15/04

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On April 15, 2004 at 06:30:14, Joachim Rang wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I read in the past of some differences between multiprocessor-Architectures
>between NUMA and SMP. Now I heard of something called MPI? Can enybody enlighten
>me what are the differences between this multiprocessor-Architectures(please not
>too technical) and what the main advantages/disadvantages for Chessengines?
>
>thanks in advance


SMP -> Symmetric MultiProcessing.  N cpus, all can do everything from handling
interrupts to initiating I/O.  Memory is shared.

NUMA -> Non-Uniform Memory Access. Just like SMP except that each CPU has local
memory that can be accessed faster than memory on other processors.

MPI -> Message Passing Interface.  It is a message passing library similar to
PVM that works mainly on clusters.  Those not knowing what they are doing might
use it on a NUMA box but it is not the best approach there.

NUMA offers some problems in that it is more efficient for a CPU to access some
parts of memory than it is to access others.  If you don't plan for this, you
simply run slower than optimal.



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