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Subject: Re: Fritz's Tablebase Initialisation

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 16:36:23 05/05/04

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On May 05, 2004 at 19:22:40, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On May 05, 2004 at 16:44:59, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>On May 05, 2004 at 16:28:35, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>
>>>On May 05, 2004 at 11:56:21, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>
>>>>On May 05, 2004 at 09:29:19, Brian Kostick wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On May 05, 2004 at 09:14:50, Mike Hood wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On May 05, 2004 at 08:12:44, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>On May 05, 2004 at 07:47:57, Mike Hood wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>I just let Filemon run while loading Fritz 8 to see why it takes so long. I was
>>>>>>>>shocked to see that during the initialisation Fritz tries to open every possible
>>>>>>>>tablebase. For instance...
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Open kpk.nbw.emd -- good, it's there
>>>>>>>>Open kpknbw.emd -- file not found
>>>>>>>>Open kpk_nbw.emd -- file not found
>>>>>>>>Open kpk_nbw_emd -- file not found (I never knew this format was valid)
>>>>>>>>Open kpk.nbw -- file not found
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>And the same five accesses for the nbb file.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Why carry on with the other three after finding the first tablebase? But it gets
>>>>>>>>even wilder when it comes to the 6-piece tablebases. All 365 possible tablebase
>>>>>>>>pairs in all possible formats are accessed, even though I don't have any on my
>>>>>>>>disk. Thousands of "file not found" results. Just one example, to show how
>>>>>>>>ludicrous it is:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>First Fritz tries to open krbnkp.nbw.emd, krbnkpnbw.emd, krbnkp_nbw.emd and
>>>>>>>>krbnkp.nbw.emd. Almost the same as before, except Fritz is assuming 6-piece
>>>>>>>>tablebases are compressed. But then Fritz tries to open krbnkp.0.nbw.emd,
>>>>>>>>krbnkp.0_nbw.emd, krbnkp.0nbw.emd and krbnkp.0_nbw_emd. Then krbnkp.1.nbw.emd,
>>>>>>>>etc... and krbnkp.2.nbw.emd... and all the way through to krbnkp.g.nbw.emd. That
>>>>>>>>means 136 disk accesses for a tablebase that I don't have! And that's only one
>>>>>>>>tablebase out of 365.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>Wouldn't it be much easier just to scan the tablebase directory and only open
>>>>>>>>the files that actually exist?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Both nalimov and i do this in a similar way.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>If you are willing to write code for this that works faster and works both for
>>>>>>>windows and *nix, then i will be real happy to use it.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Best Regards,
>>>>>>>Vincent
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Thanks for the info, Vincent. I assumed the initialization code had been written
>>>>>>by Chessbase, not by Eugene.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>My math was a bit off in my original post, but after looking at Filemon's log I
>>>>>>can give the exact figure: Fritz attempts to access 33647 non-existent tablebase
>>>>>>files. And please... you can't tell me that if the file krbnkp.0.nbw.emd doesn't
>>>>>>exist it still makes sense to look for krbnkp.1.nbw.emd, krbnkp.2.nbw.emd, etc
>>>>>>all the way to krbnkp.g.nbw.emd. That's a waste of processor time on any
>>>>>>operating system.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>Could you report the time from the first tb until the last? I know it will
>>>>>change from system to system but curious just to know how long it takes there.
>>>>>BK
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>About 10 seconds on my box with about 1/2 terabyte of egtbs in use, maybe a tad
>>>>less than 1/2 terabyte..
>>>
>>>About 3 hours for a 512 processor supercomputer though with 512GB ram and 1 TB
>>>i/o.
>>
>>So?  It would take about 1 second on a Cray T932.
>>
>>But how would you know since you didn't have any?  More made-up numbers???
>>
>>I can open all the 6-piece files over NFS in a couple of minutes on my laptop...
>
>Oh Cray would crash when initalizing at 512 processors the egtb's. It doesn't
>have that many file handles in its OS as you must locally initialize
>everything...

You don't need that many file handles on the Cray I mentioned. It is fully SMP
shared memory.  N files == N file handles, even though not all are kept open all
the time...

What you mean by locally on a T90 I have absolutely no idea...


>
>This 1024 processor R14000 replaced in fact a huge old Cray that we see you post
>so much about...



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