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Subject: Re: Differences in speedup

Author: Vincent Diepeveen

Date: 16:31:34 05/07/04

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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%...

I have spoken to several commercial programmers and we all had similar results.
Such an optimization (just for single cpu) will save 5-10%. Most claim 10%.

Whether it's 4 or 5 or 6% is irrelevant.

You just compare apples to petatoes.





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