Author: Bruce Moreland
Date: 15:42:13 09/21/99
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On September 21, 1999 at 18:04:44, Peter Kappler wrote: >On September 21, 1999 at 14:54:28, Scott Gasch wrote: > >>On September 21, 1999 at 13:54:44, Bruce Moreland wrote: >> >>>When I came back from Germany I was lazy about taking the machine out of the >>>box, so it sat in the box for some huge long period of time. Then I got mail >>>from Vincent asking me to run some test for him, and there the machine sits, in >>>ply 20, having looked at 2.8 trillion nodes at approximately 890K nodes/second. >> >>I am curious as to how in the world one gets a node rate that high? I dont >>doubt that it can be done but with my code on (fairly) fast hardware I only see >>about 150k. Even if I strip out the eval routine and make it just consider >>material balance I only see about 200k or so. >> >>I have implemented every speed enhancement i can think of except coding up the >>eval in assembly language by hand (I do not know i386 assembly language well >>enough for that). For instance, I use movepools to avoid calls to malloc >>altogether, have piece->location tables to avoid searching for pieces, a pawn >>hash, material strengths and piece counts for each side are part of the >>position... >> >>Can anyone suggest other often used ways to boost search rate? >> >>Thanks, >>Scott > > >Sure, you got about $12,000 to spare? > >Bruce runs Ferret runs on a quad processor Xeon-450. > > :-) It's a Gateway ALR 9200 quad Xeon 450 server with three 9 gig disks and 512 megabytes of RAM. It is very noisy, when you turn it on the disks power up one by one and it sounds like a multi-engine jet starting up. It is not as big as those blue washing machines that Junior and Fritz were on, and perhaps it may have passed without much notice in Paderborn, but it was there. In its box it weighs 118 pounds. I had to take the power supplies and disk drives out to get the airline to allow me to take it on the plane. Thanks again to Vincent for driving the me and the thing across Europe and back in his car. When asked if Ferret could crush Deep Blue my answer was yes, if it was dropped out of an airplane. But I think that with this computer it may only need to be dropped five or six stories, which is progress of a sort. bruce
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