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Subject: Re: New list WCCC participants and Free Hardware

Author: Gian-Carlo Pascutto

Date: 01:00:31 05/29/04

Go up one level in this thread


On May 28, 2004 at 21:27:16, Dann Corbit wrote:

>I am guessing that the latest professional programs are not NUMA ready yet,
>though probably Deep Sjeng is.

The Opteron doesn't really need NUMA code for 4 way, although it may start
to be an issue for 8 way.

There are a few pitfalls, which Crafty was having issues with, but they are
not hard to fix, and the top pro's don't seem the have them. See my tests at
Graz with my machine there that I posted here - all of them scaled excellent.

(including Deep Sjeng obviously :)

>The faster the hardware, the better crafty does.  I think (compared to others)
>crafty scales better.  That would indicate better algorithms and inferior
>microoptimization.  Also, the other deep programs do not seem to benefit nearly
>so much from multiple CPUs (though they may have possibly ironed this out).

I have certainly seen no evidence for that - see my tests with them.

>On the other hand, I suspect that if Deep Sjeng got the same 8 CPU machine, then
>it would win.

I don't think so. The program still has weaknesses that a bit of
extra hardware will not overcome.

>What sort of hardware are you bringing to the party?

Uh, the provideed P4 2.8Ghz or maybe my Athlon64 2.2Ghz.

>Now, Shredder Fritz and Junior might come on powerful hardware (e.g. 2.4 GHz AMD
>64 bit dual) but I am guessing that would translate to about 3 GHz throughput.
>[All the measurements I have seen showed them scaling very poorly]

Again, I cannot confirm that at all! Also, both Junior and Fritz were
already 4 way last year.

>Crafty -125 Elo (Crafty 19.12 and 19.13 are huge improvements on the
>predecessors)

Crafty 18.12 is about 200 ELO worse than Shredder 8 - I wonder if
there has been that much improvement in Crafty.

>So Crafty would have to overcome about 175 Elo to be evenly matched against
>Shredder in my crude model.  So, with an 8-way box he would have about
>.65*2.4*8=12.5 GHz (let's say 12).  That would be about 4 times faster than
>Shredder, Fritz or Junior.  With +70 Elo per doubling, that would be 140 Elo.
>So crafty would have a real shot at it, even against Shredder.

These maths seem rather flakey. First of all, 8 way does not mean 8 times
faster. A good estimate is a speedup of 6 on an 8 way machine, and quite
possibly less. Also, the SSDF has less than 70 ELO for a tripling of speed
nowadays, so 70 for a doubling is also way too high.

Anyway, I'm happy that at least someone is reasoning about this. I think
if you redo the math with the adjusted estimations, and compute the chance
for Crafty to win the event, it'll most likely be 'statistically
insignificant' :) And so it will be for Sjeng. Then you can understand
where my 'claims' are coming from.

--
GCP



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