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Subject: Re: Stormx is this a Crafty Clone??

Author: Anthony Cozzie

Date: 06:51:43 05/26/04

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On May 25, 2004 at 21:33:32, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On May 25, 2004 at 19:52:56, Will Singleton wrote:
>
>>On May 25, 2004 at 17:33:12, Sean Empey wrote:
>>
>>>On May 25, 2004 at 17:09:02, Matthew Hull wrote:
>>>
>>>>On May 25, 2004 at 05:48:02, Sean Empey wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>No, it is not a clone of crafty. I will tell you that it does use Dan Corbit's
>>>>>big book and crafty's book code, and the same egtb code that is used in crafty
>>>>>18.15. Other than that not much else is from crafty. Oh some of the Print
>>>>>functions I referenced are from crafty 16.x if memory serves correct. Storm is
>>>>a >SMP engine and uses a completely different algorithm for its search eval. It
>>>>>uses ABDADA.I have offered portions of code to Professor Hyatt but on the
>>>>terms >it not be published or used by him or others. My move generator
>>>>functions are >completely different and I can not go into detail regarding them
>>>>as some of the >code came from a professional programmer (at least the
>>>>approach) on the >condition I not release that code ever. Because a program has
>>>>similar evals does >not make it a clone. If I wanted to clone crafty I would
>>>>not have been working >on Storm for years; actually starting about one year
>>>>before CCT1. As I have told >Professor Hyatt. I am not cloning crafty. We have
>>>>talked and he is fine. Any >other questions someone may have; I'm willing to
>>>>answer them to the best of my >ability. I would appreciate ad hominems and
>>>>other unnecessary comments not be >made as I have stated I'm willing to back-up
>>>>my claim.
>>>>
>>>>Hi Sean,
>>>>
>>>>A question about SMP.  Does Storm use threads or processes when splitting the
>>>>search?  Which do you think is most effective?
>>>>Thanks!
>>>>
>>>
>>>I use ABDADA, which I learned from an ICCA publication. You can find info here:
>>>http://www.recherche.enac.fr/~weill/publications.html
>>>
>>>There is no communication between threads. Just a shared hash table and it's
>>>pretty easy to implement. I have been happy with it. It may not be the best for
>>>SMP machines. Professor Hyatt says nothing beats a perfectly implemented PVS. He
>>>may be right.
>>
>>Hi Sean,
>>
>>I'm like someday to do multiprocessing, but I haven't studied it.  You indicate
>>there's no communciation between threads, how does that work?  I assume there's
>>one thread that does i/o, and that thread must somehow inform the other what the
>>position is and get search results.
>>
>>Also, I think I understand how two threads can share the same hash table, but
>>how do you handle locking?  Is it automatic or do you need to explicitly lock
>>the memory while writing?  And what kind of speedup do you get?  Does the ICCA
>>article use the same approach (shared hash, multiple processes, no comm)?
>>
>>Will
>
>
>This is a _very_ primitive approach to parallel search.  It will do fairly
>reasonably with 2 processors.  Go beyond that and performance becomes very
>poor...
>
>It is one of those "easy to implement" approaches, but in this case you really
>do get what you "pay for" and since you don't "pay very much in terms of
>effort..."

In the paper they quoted a 64X speedup on a 128 processor machine, which is
pretty good I would think.  It doesn't seem like it would perform that well
after looking at the algorithm though.

anthony



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