Re: [gnugo-devel] multi-threaded GNU go

[Paul Pogonyshev]

Christian Bienia wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> > > Before we can make a final decision, I wanted to get an opinion on that.
> > > Do you think it would make a good parallelization project? How difficult
> > > would GNU Go be to parallelize?
> > 
> > GNU Go would not be easy to parallelize but if it were done
> > it would be hugely valuable. I think that some on this list
> > have thought about this and may have more technical comments.
> 
> It's ok if the parallelization requires some work - the students will
> learn more in that case. ;-) There will also be no other assignment, so
> the students can work on the project the whole remaining semester. But
> we need at least an initial roadmap and a rough idea about the amount of
> work required before we can propose it to the students. There's some
> leeway which can be used to adjust the work per student by determining
> the number of students for this project.

I was the one trying to implement multi-threaded branch [1].  With all due
respect, I doubt it is doable without good knowledge how the engine is
implemented internally.  E.g. you need to synchronize or split to one per
thread several caches that exist etc.  The branch never reached working
state as I abandoned it, as far as I remember after unpromising timing
results.

[1] cvs -d:pserver:address@hidden:/sources/gnugo -r multi-board co gnugo

Paul