Author: Roberto Nerici
Date: 08:55:33 04/15/04
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On April 15, 2004 at 11:26:28, Joachim Rang wrote: >On April 15, 2004 at 08:59:24, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >> >>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. > > >So for a chessengine a SMP-System is the best and a NUMA-System must be >addressed with special code, right? MPI works for cluster but cluster are not >efficient for chess because of latency and sharing problems, right? Not necessarily. The NUMA-system needs special code to work at its best, but it may well (probably will in fact) work better than the SMP-system *if* it has the code to address the NUMA issues. Also NUMA may become more attractive as the number of CPUs increases; it is likely to scale better than SMP. As for clusters, two single-processor machines (making a cluster) will probably give poor performance compared to a 2-cpu SMP machine, but two 2-cpu machines clustered is obviously a possibility against one 2-cpu machine. Roberto/.
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