Author: Ted Summers
Date: 07:08:26 11/21/05
Hydra, the hardware project that is being developed in Abu Dhabi, is currently installed on 32 processors of a 64 processor array. Each processor has a special purpose hardware enhancement, a super-fast FPGA chip that executes a critical part of the search and the end node evaluations. The entire system runs at around 1.5 million nodes per second. Why only 32 processors, we asked Dr Donninger? "Because Hydra was optimised for that number," he replied. "I originally defined 'any number of processors" to equal 32, but we are rewriting the program to make it equivalent to 128." So there is a lot of opportunity to make Hydra even faster and more dangerous. Deep Junior is running on a very fast dual core AMD machine, located in California (why there? Amir Ban: "Because the weather is so good."). Junior is consistantly searching at over six million positions per second on this machine. Both Hydra and Deep Junior are connected to the playing room in Bilbao via the Internet. Fritz 9: This is the latest build of the new Fritz 9 program engine, which the authors have named "Fritz Bilbao". The program is written by Frans Morsch and Mathias Feist, and the latter is operating the machine in this event. Mathias brought a notebook from the ChessBase office, but discovered that my own Dell Inspiron with its 2.0 GHz Centrino and 750 MB RAM was about 15 percent faster. So he confiscated my machine, installed the new engine on it and is using it for the games. Fritz is running at around 1.6 million positions per second on the chessbase.com reporting machine. http://chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2747
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