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

Author: Vincent Lejeune

Date: 02:46:32 08/25/04

Go up one level in this thread


On August 24, 2004 at 14:57:26, Les Fernandez wrote:

>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.

If I remember well, 20 Mn/s , cards could do the double but the PCI bus is a
bottleneck, so with a PCI-Express bus , we can expect 40 Mn/s with 16 FPGA
cards.


>
>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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