----- Original Message -----
From: "Geoff Jacobs" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Vincent Diepeveen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: "Robert G. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; "Jim Lux"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <beowulf@beowulf.org>; "Angel Dimitrov"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2006 9:19 PM
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] commercial clusters
Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
The basic flaw i see in some assumptions taken here is that you as a
human want
to do a running contest with a car.
In reality that isn't the case.
People just want to see whose car is better, not whether they can outrun
the car.
Your analogy is poor. Any computer playing chess must conform to the
same rules as a human player. A better analogy would be a foot-race
between a human and a bipedal robot. Do you think 100k Ordinary
People[tm] would be willing to lay down $10k for such a curiosity?
Well the hard facts is that hundreds of thousands of $3000-$20k
chesscomputers (dedicated with a 10Mhz chip) have been sold until the pc was
faster than the dedicated chesscomputers. A vaste multiple indeed of that of
$50-$1000 computers has been sold at the time.
Around 1983 or so when the dutch programmers started producing dedicated
computers they handsdown kicked 99.9% of the population already, so that's
just not the question here,
to counter RGB.
By now it's not 99.9% but more like that it is a handful who make a chance
in a match and just a couple of thousands on the planet who now and then can
win a game from the machine.
The first parallel pc chess software was crafty in 1998, followed by me in
1999.
First commercial sales were done by chessbase around 1999 of deepfritz6.
Amazingly world title 1999 went still to a single cpu program (Shredder),
despite MiT joining for example with Cilkchess at 512 cpu's origin3800
(other participants like p.conners at 200+ node dual P2 machine, zugzwang at
a 512 cpu T3E etc).
Nowadays all strong pc programs are also SMP. Not all of them run that well
on quad machines though and majority of them has a very poor speedup out of
4 cores already (most sit around 2.0 - 2.4).
So the move to low latency clusters now is logical.
Vincent
Additional they want to analyze their own running (most important
feature) in the most objective manner possible, or they want to compete
with it in a 300 KM/h contest.
To look like a winner, people are prepared to pay any price.
If this were the case, we'd all drive Bugatti Veyrons and Porsche GT1s.
Vincent
--
Geoffrey D. Jacobs
Go to the Chinese Restaurant,
Order the Special
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