[computer-go] Go hardware?

[terry mcintyre]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydra_(chess)

Hydra, built with 64 Intel Xeons and a number of FPGAs - possibly 64 or 128, "has so far no loss on record against an unaided human player in over-the-board play."

FPGA clock speeds may seem unimpressive, but when you have hundreds of processors working in tandem, executing a large unit of work every cycle, the combined results can be quite impressive. However, these beasties are not really programmed, from what I have read; they are designed. FPGAs are closer to computer circuitry than to programmable computers.

On the other hand, there is at least one effort to develop a sort of programming language/compiler for FPGAs.

http://www.xilinx.com/publications/xcellonline/xcell_53/xc_hydra53.htm goes into considerable detail. According to the author, each FPGA engine performs a position evaluation in 9 cycles which would require 2000 on a pentium; there are many such engines on each FPGA array, operating in parallel.

As for video cards, providing one can map the algorithm to the parallel hardware, one may also see considerable speedups. Of course, that three-letter word "map" hides a good bit of intellectual heavy lifting.

Terry McIntyre



----- Original Message ----
From: Joshua Shriver <jshriver at gmail.com>
To: computer-go <computer-go at computer-go.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 6, 2007 6:15:32 AM
Subject: Re: [computer-go] Go hardware?

I've always been fascinated with things like this, especially FPGA boards.
Though from every article or post I've read concerning (at least
chess) and things like FPGA, video cards... the bug speed is to slow
to really be effective.

-Josh

On 3/5/07, Chris Fant <chrisfant at gmail.com> wrote:
> Maybe this would make a good Go card:
>
> http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/peripherals/nvidia-ships-128core-graphics-cards-for-highend-film-editors-graphics-pros-apple-excited-241478.php
> _______________________________________________
> computer-go mailing list
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