Re: [Bug-gnubg] GNUbgW speedingup50%

[Gary Wong]

On Thu, Jun 27, 2002 at 09:09:25PM +0000, Joern Thyssen wrote:
> (1) have a master-process that distributes a task to a slave
>     (a task: a game in a rollout, a background analysis, a roll in a
>     multi-ply evaluation etc etc)
> (2) the slave does some computing, and return the result to the master
> (3) when all tasks have been processed: "kill" the slaves
> 
> The advantage is that this can be implemented with many different
> libraries (pthreads, MPI, probably beowulf libs etc), so basically the
> same code could run on many different multi-processor platforms (both
> SMP and distributed systems).

Yes, I think this approach is very good.  Personally I think there is
a lot of value in keeping the model abstract enough to allow multiple
implementations in this case, as you suggest.

Since the slaves are performing relatively simple tasks (i.e. no user
or system interaction), there should be minimal issues regarding the
concurrency between slaves (there will be a few, such as multiple
slaves sharing access to one evaluation cache, but those should be
relatively easy to spot and to deal with).

If the master is allowed to run in parallel with the slaves (accepting
new commands from the user while slaves are still running, rather than
just waiting for all slaves to complete first), there will be far more
scope for concern.  This sort of parallelism would be required for
"background" auto-analysis, however.

Cheers,
Gary.
-- 
   Gary Wong           address@hidden           http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~gary/