Hi!
On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 05:56:04PM -0700, Adrian Petrescu wrote:
> That's a lot to think about, I'll come back to you about it soon. But I
> should mention that I was not at all considering having everyone "use
> whatever Amazon resources they could pay for," which of course leads to the
> same type of arms race as before. My idea was always to get the community to
> agree on a baseline that's both powerful enough to be interesting and cheap
> enough to be affordable (possibly the 64 cores you mentioned) and just set
> that as the entrance fee (minus whatever subsidy the organizers can get).
BTW, when I said Pachi would participate, I understood that the event
would be sponsored by Amazon or such; $20 is currently not totally
trivial amount to me and I think could be a hurdle (if only psychological)
to other participants as well. Entry fees for computer go tournaments are
a fairly unusual thing and I'm not sure many people will be motivated
enough to pay one, especially if there is also no prize fund. ;-)
Moreover, you cannot expect people like me to run multiple programs as
basic benchmarks (I usually run the GNUGo, Mogo and Fuego instances in
the KGS tournaments).
I think cluster should be part of the the hardware level, since it is
a hard problem many efforts are focused on - it would be a shame not to
give credit for it. But that does not exclude staying on (relatively)
the humble side - you can have just two or four 4-core instances.
If your program cannot make use of the two instances, that is fine, it
will run just on a single 4-core. If it cannot do multi-threading, okay,
it will use only a single core there. I think that's pretty fair. After
all, usually major strength improvements far outweight the effect of
just throwing more raw power at the problem, especially when the CPU
increase is just four-fold or eight-fold. So IMHO having a cluster that
is reasonably small should make everyone happy. Or not? ;-)
--
Petr "Pasky" Baudis
The true meaning of life is to plant a tree under whose shade
you will never sit.
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