Hideki Kato wrote:
Don Dailey: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
On Thu, 2008-10-02 at 19:17 +0200, Michael Markefka wrote:
So, when are we going to see distributed computing? [EMAIL PROTECTED],
[EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] With Go engines that scale well to increased
processing capacity, imagine facilitating a few thousand PCs to do the
computing. For good measure, [EMAIL PROTECTED] as about 800,000 nodes online as
of now.
This subject keeps coming up - but it's not a good application at all
for this type of thing. I think if you read the instructions on how to
do this you will see that it's extremely impractical for a go program.
Imagine trying to build an interactive chess or go program on an
incredibly slow network and you will get the picture. Imagine the
network is something like using email to communicate.
The [EMAIL PROTECTED] type of stuff is based on a bunch of machines being able
to go off and do a work unsupervised - and basically communicating with
a single centralized process somewhere - very infrequently.
It might be possible to build a huge cooperating go program network but
I believe it would require building our own system - and it would be far
from trivial. It would have to be designed in an extremely fault
tolerant way too.
You and David is right in general. @home type systems are
good for larger problems without realtimeness. However, I'd like to
say it is possible to use such sysytem for computer-go tournament and
it is not necessary to build my own system. I'm now at Beijing and
using a quad-core pc with two Playstation 3 (PS3) consoles connected
together via a Gigabit Ethernet lan. One PS3 increases simulations
about 10% on 9x9 with current not-optimized-for-Cell implementatiion.
The program running on PS3 Linux is just a simple and small
application.
The long communication time via Internet will really decrease
performance of UCT but for larger boards and with much heavier
playouts that I will use, thousands or more PS3s will be helpful.
Hideki
- Don
Those are kind of the lines I've been thinking along. Go might not be
the ideal application for distributed computing, but as long as there
_are_ gains to be exploited, it might be worth the trouble. I've looked
over the Gelly paper linked by Peter and it seems like indeed there
could be gains and further optimizations to benefit from. (It's 12.30am
here now though, so I'll leave the proper read through for tomorrow and
continue then.) Shooting a football isn't the ideal way to kill
somebody, but when I shoot half a million footballs at him, I just might
club him to death.
Another thing: All those theoretical considerations aside, have there
been ANY large scale tests? Even the Gelly paper admitted to not being
able to run large-scale tests. Perhaps something worthwhile would crop
up when actually trying? Great things have been stumbled upon by
accident in the past. :)
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