Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Differences in speedup

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 09:02:28 05/07/04

Go up one level in this thread


On May 07, 2004 at 11:53:29, Andreas Guettinger wrote:

>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.
>
>I don't understand that. What does that mean?
>
>regards
>Andy

Ever heard of "the fog of war"?  This is "the fog of vincent".

In crafty, I pass a pointer to a "TREE struct" around so that each thread can
use a different struct for their local tree state.  This is done even with mt=0
or when Crafty is compiled with no SMP support.  Vincent claims it would speed
Crafty up by 5% if the pointer were removed.  That would be neat as it didn't
slow me down 5% when I added the pointer.

But that's irrelevant because Vincent has said so...

IE everywhere that I now say tree->something such as:

tree->node_count++;

could be replaced by a non-pointer:

node_count++;

It doesn't cost 5%...




This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.