Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: Preparations for parallel search

Author: Tom Likens

Date: 20:05:41 07/09/04

Go up one level in this thread


On July 09, 2004 at 10:22:20, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On July 09, 2004 at 10:19:52, Tom Likens wrote:
>
>>On July 09, 2004 at 09:13:31, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On July 09, 2004 at 08:38:31, Tord Romstad wrote:
>>>
>>>>I am currently writing a chess engine.  Parallel search is not among my main
>>>>interests at the moment, but it is not entirely impossible that I will give it
>>>>a try some time in the future.
>>>>
>>>>In order to keep everything as flexible as possible, I would like to design
>>>>my algorithms and data structures in such a way that adding parallel search
>>>>at a later stage is feasible.  I understand that I should remove most of my
>>>>global variables and replace them with huge structs containing the same data,
>>>>and use one such struct for each thread.  Is there anything else which is
>>>>important to keep in mind?
>>>>
>>>>Tord
>>>
>>>
>>>That's the main issue assuming you are going to use lightweight processes
>>>(threads) which I believe is the best approach.  The most thread-specific data
>>>you have, which means less global data, will help performance (modified global
>>>data is not cache-friendly on a SMP box) and simplify testing (since modified
>>>global data requires atomic locks to avoid interleaved update problems).
>>
>>I haven't really looked at Crafty's SMP code, but I'm wondering how painful
>>was it to support both Windows and Linux?  I'm familiar with the pthreads
>>model used under Unix, but haven't a clue about the equivalent code for
>>Windows.
>>
>>
>>--tom
>
>
>Wasn't hard.  Windows uses different system call names.  IE no pthread_create(),
>but that's all.  And it is easily handled by conditional compilation in one
>place.

Thanks for the reply Bob.  It's definitely on my ever-lengthening TODO list.

regards,
--tom



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.