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Subject: Re: Differences in speedup

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 08:19:53 05/07/04

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On May 07, 2004 at 04:38:00, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On May 06, 2004 at 19:03:48, martin fierz wrote:
>
>>aloha!
>>
>>bob posted some crafty logfiles running a 24-position test set on his ftp site
>>(for anyone else crazy enough to repeat what i did:
>>ftp.cis.uab.edu/pub/hyatt/smpdata)
>>
>>these are logfiles of crafty running as single CPU, dual, or quad; on opterons.
>>i took the last completed ply on the single CPU set for each position (marked by
>>-> in the logfile, i hope...), wrote down the time to complete this ply, and did
>>this for all logfiles. there are 9 of these, 4 repeats for 2 and 4 CPUs. i
>>computed the speedup for time-to-finish-ply-X for each of the multi-CPU runs
>>with the following results:
>>
>>2 CPUs:
>>1.961 +- 0.093
>>1.888 +- 0.074
>>1.846 +- 0.078
>>1.763 +- 0.084
>>
>>4 CPUs:
>>3.15 +- 0.15
>>3.29 +- 0.20
>>3.06 +- 0.12
>>3.19 +- 0.13
>>
>>now, is there any meaning to this, and if yes, what?
>>
>>point #1 to make is that the numbers here are mutually consistent with each
>>other, given the error margins quoted. which should show those skeptical of this
>>statistical approach that it makes sense to do it this way, rather than to just
>>write "i measured speedup 3.1".
>>
>>point #2 is that the speedup on 4 CPUs on average is 3.17 in this test, which
>>might be one point for bob in the duel with vincent; although i suspect that the
>>speedup depends on the hardware architecture - i will leave this question to the
>>parallel computing experts though...
>
>Bob has tested the SMP version 1 cpu versus SMP version 2 or 4 cpus. The single
>cpu version of crafty is just hardly existing because of a stupid thread pointer
>which is a constant. Optimizing that crafty is 5% faster for sure in time single
>cpu at opteron.
>
>He should test the single cpu version versus the SMP version IMHO.

There is _very_ little difference.  And such testing would require a _major_
rewrite.  Pointless.


>
>Even then speedup will be much better than the 2.8 from the quad xeon, the
>opteron is a real highend chip which is ideal for SMP applications depending
>completely upon cache and memory subsystems, unlike the intel xeon.

Funny guy, knowing that I have been getting these _same_ speedup numbers on my
dual and quad xeon boxes.  Also knowing that you keep claiming that Crafty sucks
on a NUMA box.  Why don't you pick an argument and stick with it???


>
>In future speedups will again get better. In 2005 or 2006 the opteron will be
>released as a dual core chip. So you have on chip CMP then.

That has _nothing_ to do with parallel speedup.


>
>>point #3 is perhaps most important for the bob vs vincent duel: the standard
>>error for a 4 CPU test run is on the order of 0.2. if vincent's tests were with
>>a similarly small number of positions, then the differences measured in these
>>experiments (2.8 / 3.0 / 3.1) are statistically insignificant, and the whole
>>argument is pointless :-)
>
>>cheers
>>  martin
>>
>>
>>disclaimer: i computed the search time in seconds from crafty's log file by
>>converting minutes:seconds to seconds in my head. i may have made a mistake here
>
>>or there, although i did my best not to - but it's late at night and quite
>>boring to look through crafty logfiles...



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