I've thought about this a bit, although I haven't implemented anything. I think one has to try for (i), but given the huge penalties you pay for branching if not all processors in a group follow the same path, I can't see how to make it work. (ii) would be a lot easier, and one can then do quite a bit of work at each intersection, but the end result might not be much better than with a traditional single core. It's unclear to me how cleaning up captured stones would be implemented in either case, and I don't see why you think that board_height cycles would be enough.
If you make any progress with either approach, I would love to hear about it. Álvaro. On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Petr Baudis <pa...@ucw.cz> wrote: > Hi! > > There has been some talk about implementing monte-carlo playouts on > GPUs in the past, I have heard rumours about Polish bachelor student > doing libego -> GPGPU conversion as a project, etc. but I know of > nothing concrete ever materializing - is anybody aware of anything? > > We have recently bought very high-end nVidia card at our university > department for trying out GPGPU and I'm thinking of a little project for > myself, maybe... > > I'm not much skilled in this kind of programming though, so I'm not > quite sure what the best design approach to take would be... my current > ideas so far are either > > (i) Have one game per pipeline, and in each cycle, take a board and > transform it by playing a random move (or possibly have an extra cleanup > cycles if capturing stones would take too long); you should be able to > do some neat pattern matching and so too > > (ii) Have one intersection per pipeline, in one cycle play a random > move, then have board_height cycles for captures and liberty updates > to ripple through to all the neighbors. The code would be much more > streamlined, but I'm not sure yet if there is a good way to do the > rippling - ORing bitmaps? > > I guess there is a lot of things to try out. > > -- > Petr "Pasky" Baudis > The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty > in the morning feeling just terrible. -- Jean Kerr > _______________________________________________ > computer-go mailing list > computer-go@computer-go.org > http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/ > _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
