[Computer-go] Parallela and Computer Go

[Petr Baudis]

Hi!

There is a new fairly exciting parallelization platform in the works,
currently as a kickstarter project (that will unfortunately likely not
make it since while it's technically awesome, its marketing/PR campaign
was far from stellar, but if you like it, don't hesitate to pledge in
the next three days yet :) :

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adapteva/parallella-a-supercomputer-for-everyone/

It consists of a control processor (in fact an FPGA) and a grid of 16
parallel processors in slightly Cell-like arrangement, with a promise
to dramatically grow the number of processors in future. Single board
costs $99.

Something worth knowing about, I think - while the processors
currently have fairly small amount of local memory, unfortunately, they
still seem to me as much more suitable for Computer Go than GPUs as the
thread on each parallel processor can be completely independent from
others. Perhaps if the project makes it (on kickstarter or in another
way), this is the hardware side of the next Computer Go strength boost
to come.

Petr "Pasky" Baudis
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[ds]

Hi!

I saw this too, but the cores are ARM A9. With oakfoam one such core
does 150 playouts / second on 19x19 (iPad1 with NiceGo, the free version
of oakfoam for iPad), one i7-2600 core is more than 8 times faster.

Even with good scaling a 64 core machine is only twice as fast as a
i7-2600 I would think.

Detlef

[Lars Nilsson]

Even if it is not terribly powerful per core, it could in theory allow
for more people to cheaply do scaling tests and experiment with
different algorithms to see how they behave as the number of cores
increases (assuming there are not some architecture limitations in the
hardware design preventing this).

Lars Nilsson

[Hideki Kato]

Yah, the starter kit has toooo small memories both on board and on the
chip.

I believe Xeon Phi, or Knight Corner, is much more practical, though far
expensive. One interesting feature of Knight Corner is the 512-bit
register file which can have bitmaps of 19x19 board.

Hideki

Petr Baudis: <2012102409...@machine.or.cz>:

--
Hideki Kato <mailto:hideki...@ybb.ne.jp>

[Petr Baudis]

Hi!

On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 02:00:52PM +0200, ds wrote:
> I saw this too, but the cores are ARM A9. With oakfoam one such core
> does 150 playouts / second on 19x19 (iPad1 with NiceGo, the free version
> of oakfoam for iPad), one i7-2600 core is more than 8 times faster.
>
> Even with good scaling a 64 core machine is only twice as fast as a
> i7-2600 I would think.

Of course, the performance is not stellar per se. However, Parallela
based solution would be much cheaper both to buy and to run; low power
consumption also means that there's no big deal in stacking many of them
together, though I'm not sure what memory sharing options there will be
in that case.