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Subject: Re: Differences in speedup

Author: Robert Hyatt

Date: 13:53:57 05/07/04

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On May 07, 2004 at 16:28:24, Andreas Guettinger wrote:

>On May 07, 2004 at 12:02:28, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>
>>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%...
>
>For me this seems faster than if (SMP== 0) everywhere...
>
>regards
>Andy


I'm not sure what you mean.. There is only _one_ test in Search, done once per
node.  Comment it out and you can't measure the speed change..  If you compile
without -DSMP it is removed and the speed difference is < .1%.  But anyone can
confirm this easily enough without Vincent's speculation...



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