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Subject: Re: 8-way Opteron machine at last available

Author: Les Fernandez

Date: 11:57:26 08/24/04

Go up one level in this thread


On August 24, 2004 at 13:33:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:

>On August 24, 2004 at 13:11:24, Torstein Hall wrote:
>
>>On August 24, 2004 at 11:52:53, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>
>>>On August 24, 2004 at 11:00:18, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
>>>
>>>>On August 24, 2004 at 10:42:51, Robert Hyatt wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>On August 24, 2004 at 09:06:05, Jorge Pichard wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>On August 24, 2004 at 06:16:26, Vincent Lejeune wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>A SYSTEM INTEGRATOR has started selling 5U eight way Opteron systems.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18035
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>I think it's the first 8-way system since the beginning of opteron.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Great news for computer chess where a lot of 4 way was used in tournaments since
>>>>>>>1 year !
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>It would had been a tough fight if shredder was using one against Hydra :-)
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Jorge
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>1.  It takes even more tuning as it is still a NUMA box.  On the 4-way and 2-way
>>>>>boxes memory is local, 1 hop or 2 hops away.  This adds to that.
>>>>>
>>>>>2.  it won't be 2x faster as nobody scales perfectly.  IE Crafty would probably
>>>>
>>>>Scaling              = the increase in nodes a second.
>>>>Speedup (efficiency) = the speedup in time you get out of the box
>>>
>>>No.  Those are _your_ definitions.
>>>
>>>traditional scaling means simply "as you increase the number of processors, how
>>>much does that reduce the total runtime."  There are very _few_ applications
>>>that exhibit this NPS vs search time anomoly.  Nobody cares in the world of
>>>parallel programming.
>>>
>>>I care because if I can't run 4x the NPS on 4 processors, I am losing something
>>>that I don't necessarily have to lose.  Hence the stuff done before the WCCC to
>>>solve this on the opterons which started off producing pretty bad NPS increases.
>>>
>>>But the rest of the world only cares about total runtime...
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>DIEP scales 100% on such 8 processor boxes.
>>>
>>>So do I.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>be about 1.7X faster, more or less depending on lots of things.  That is not
>>>>>enough to make up for the apparent difference in playing strength between
>>>>>Shredder and Hydra.  IE Hydra appears to be 200+ points stronger based on a
>>>>>final result of 6-2.  1.7X faster won't get 200 points for Shredder...
>>>>
>>>>To my information Hydra runs currently on a 2 processor FPGA system. New fpga
>>>>processors, as chrilly is busy rewriting his parallel search.
>>>
>>>Web site contradicts that but since I don't have access to real data, I have no
>>>idea what they are running on.  But based on the results against shredded, I
>>>really have trouble beliveing they are using just two processors.  They
>>>apparently are at least 200 Elo stronger based on the match.
>>
>>Is it not a bit early to draw such a conlcusion after a 8 games match. I guess
>>you have seen a lot longer series where the outscored program turns it around
>>and scores better  later on. And statistically I do not think it can be sayd 200
>>points with hig probability.
>>
>>Torstein
>
>While I agree somewhat, there are some circumstances that led to my conclusion:
>
>(1) long time control so no "blitz mistakes" creep in.
>
>(2) primary authors are running both so there is little chance of a poor
>configuration set-up to skew the results.
>
>(3) the games themselves make it look almost easy at times.  And when a program
>wins "easily" it is news.
>
>My impression is that Hydra is simply out-searching Shredder badly.  I don't
>have quite the same feeling about Hydra's evaluation as I have seen a few
>strange moves that other programs don't even consider.  But then I saw the
>_same_ thing back in the Deep Thought days, and just maybe those "strange moves"
>are really best with a very deep/fast search.

Hi Bob,

Any idea as to how deep Hydra is searching or NPS ?? Just curious.

Les

>
>
>>
>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>He has to as they were talking already times ago about a 512 processor hydra
>>>>version (they = university paderborn which doesn't do the actual implementation
>>>>of the parallel algorithm, chrilly does do that).
>>>>
>>>>The current implementation of hydra doesn't store last 3 ply in software, not to
>>>>mention the last 3 ply in hardware, anything in hashtables.
>>>>
>>>>The entire hashtable from each node gets broadcasted to all other nodes and
>>>>stored there.
>>>>
>>>>That's a O(N^2) operation trivially and doesn't scale.
>>>>
>>>>The actual speedup of hydra is not objectively measured so far. Just claiming 12
>>>>out of 16 without showing any actual data and already knowing that the single
>>>>cpu test doesn't use last 3 ply a hashtable, where any software program does do
>>>>that single cpu, is not a very nice comparision trivially.
>>>
>>>I haven't seen _any_ parallel search data other than my own, so all I can
>>>comment on is what I get...
>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>>The 8 processor opteron cannot be compared with the cluster at which Hydra soon
>>>>again will run when the parallellism has been succesfully rewritten to something
>>>>that actually works better.
>>>>
>>>>The latency to do a single pingpong operation is 16 microseconds at the hardware
>>>>which is located in paderborn. Note that each node has 2 processors there and
>>>>the new hardware getting build in UAE is 2 machines of 8 processors connected to
>>>>each other.
>>>>
>>>>>These machines are not bad.  There are _several_ companies with 8-way boxes
>>>>
>>>>There is not a single company selling 8 processor opteron boxes. It is well
>>>>known there are some beta versions of those boxes which several companies use to
>>>>test upon already for some years.
>>>
>>>Since I haven't tried to buy one, I won't comment.  I _have_ run on one from two
>>>different vendors within the past 12 months.  And Sun was advertising one a
>>>while back, whether they were shipping or not I can't say.
>>>
>>>>
>>>>>ready to go.  I ran on one at least 6 months ago.  AMD has had one in their
>>>>>development lab since well before the last CCT event...



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