Again, distributed perft

Discussion of chess software programming and technical issues.

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jshriver
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Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 9:41 pm
Location: Morgantown, WV, USA

Re: Again, distributed perft

Post by jshriver »

If you needed a dedicated server (linux) I'd be willing to host if possible.

I currently run 2, 1 vhost web account and 1 linode Linux server (which OICS is currently running).

The machine is under utilized and I barely his 1% bandwidth allocation so would gladly share for such a project.
gladius
Posts: 568
Joined: Tue Dec 12, 2006 10:10 am
Full name: Gary Linscott

Re: Co-location server requirements

Post by gladius »

sje wrote:The history of distributed computing, and SETI@home in particular, shows that server requirements have been repeatedly and severely underestimated.
Or, you could start with a cost of $0 with EC2, and migrate to dedicated boxes if the project takes off? Even then, I'd use a hosted box, not a colo. For example, for $50/mo you get a quad core with 16Gb ram - http://www.hetzner.de/en/hosting/produk ... server/ex4.

How many people do you expect to be running the perft client, and how many updates/second? Right now, running the micro ec2 instance, the fishtest server easily handles hundreds of updates a minute, logging all the results to a database, and serving the webpage from the same machine.

That's at a utilization of about 3-5% average. So, you'd need thousands of updates a minute before it would start becoming a problem.
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sje
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Re: Again, distributed perft

Post by sje »

While I'm sure that Perft@home would succeed if properly staffed and funded, I'm also sure that I can't do much in either aspect, at least at present.

What I could do is modify my CookieCat chess program, which already has several different perft routines, and turn it into a Perft@home client. This would mean adding little more than a command line argument parser and a reporting facility.

Using CookieCat to build a client is attractive because:

1. It's open source.
2. It's been very well tested.
3. It uses bitboards, and so is reasonably fast on a 64 bit machine (but can run on a 32 bit box).
4. It's written in Free Pascal which has itself been ported to many different platforms. Having a portable client is very important to attract a large number of volunteer end users.

CookieCat could also be used to build the Perft@home server software, but hooks for a database, the network, and other BOINC requirements would be needed. This would take same time, for sure.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/316 ... kieCat.tar