Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 12:47:18 12/28/99
Go up one level in this thread
On December 28, 1999 at 11:34:49, Djordje Vidanovic wrote: >On December 28, 1999 at 10:59:03, Vincent Diepeveen wrote: > >>On December 28, 1999 at 10:20:42, Djordje Vidanovic wrote: >> >>>I got Deep Junior 6 several days ago and decided to find out more about it by >>>staging a tournament with my currently strongest engines under the Deep Junior >>>GUI. I decided on a round robin with programs playing 4 games against each >>>other. Time controls were G/25 (game in 25 minutes, sudden death), which is the >>>level most commonly used in rapid chess and the one quite likely to be used by >>>computer chess fans when playing their programs. >>> >>>The roster included two SMP programs -- Deep Junior and Crafty 16.15, and two >>>other super strong programs, Fritz (test version 6.66) and Hiarcs 7.32. The >>>venue was my dualboard PII/400 machine. Each program used 32MB hash, and the >>>Nimzo 7.32 opening book. Pondering and learning were off. >> >>Are you telling here that you are running 2 programs at 2 cpu's, >>so junior at 2 processors and crafty at 2 processors sometimes have >>a big problem that another program is eating up cpu time, thereby >>locking the whole process? >> >>Or did you use the right method involving 2 computers: >> - dual PII400 >> - single cpu computer >> >>How did you do the test? >> >>If you run a parallel program at 2 cpu's >>against another program at the same cpu's, then >>the dual version of that program is having major problems, >>as it cannot search on as a processor sometimes gets blocked by another >>process. Thereby reducing the nodes a second and plydepths a program >>running parallel gets. >> > >I tested the programs on a single computer, using a very simple method to ensure >that they can play in a more or less fair manner. Pondering was off and I >checked the CPU utilization via the Task Manager in Win 2000. There was no CPU >hogging, nor were the processes blocked. The nodes were evenly distributed, and >reached the same heights as when I used only one SMP program. Of course, you >have a point that this is not the best way to test programs. However, my other >computer is a single CPU comp and I could not test the SMP programs there. > >*** Djordje You had better check again. Once Crafty starts an SMP search, it fires up a second process for the second CPU. _this_ process will _never_ wait or be idle. It will be burning the CPU forever unless you can somehow make windows not give it any CPU time. From what I know, 1 cpu was toasted 100% of the time. Of course, crafty vs a non-SMP program would be fine as the second cpu would be free for the other program. But crafty vs deep junior would very definitely _not_ be ok as Crafty would eat 1/2 of one cpu while the other program is thinking. Not a good idea. As always... testing on one machine is simply bad. In this case, unless you took specific actions to stop the spinning thread from Crafty, it is worse than bad...
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