Poker-AI.org

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-11T17:44:51+00:00

Nasher wrote:

I ran across this while poking around:
http://www.nallatech.com/Latest-News/na ... -2008.html

It looks like you can write a custom algorithm into a FPGA and interface it directly with a Xeon socket. Wouldn't that be fun for CFRM.

Although, from the looks of it, the memory interface is kind of slow:
http://www.nallatech.com/Intel-Xeon-FSB ... stems.html

By comparison, DDR2-800 offers 12.8 GB/s efficiency. Not sure how badly that would affect performance.

Not to forget you have to learn a hardware describing language like VHDL or Verilog. It's actually not that much fun ...

Statistics: Posted by Nose — Thu Jul 11, 2013 5:44 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-11T17:24:37+00:00

what do you think about this ?

http://www.hardware-attitude.com/fiche- ... 92-go.html

192Go ram !!

Statistics: Posted by Isildur11 — Thu Jul 11, 2013 5:24 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-11T13:29:11+00:00

Statistics: Posted by cantina — Thu Jul 11, 2013 1:29 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-11T12:54:58+00:00

Maybe you need this ?
http://www.techhive.com/article/2043985 ... rency.html
Don't forget the swimming pool

Statistics: Posted by shadehs — Thu Jul 11, 2013 12:54 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-10T17:24:36+00:00

I ended up paying just under ~£950 for an i7 3820 and Asus P9X79 with 32GB of 2133mhz RAM, upgradable to 64G if it looks like my plan is working.

Kickass machine, over-clocked to just over 4.5ghz. Massively faster than my AMD machines at FPU calcs.

I basically run it 24/7 at just under 100% CPU. It wouldn't take long for that to add up if I was paying for it remotely.

Statistics: Posted by OneDayItllWork — Wed Jul 10, 2013 5:24 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-10T15:54:36+00:00

Nasher wrote:

MrBrown wrote:

raw cpu power if you need bulk is cheaper online (via hosting providers, either cloud or arrays of dedicated), than actual hardware you may want to purchase.

I don't agree. Depending on your needs and the time requirements, online can be quite a bit more expensive than purchasing a server/workstation outright.

especially when you can build a good machine as cheap as this

Quote:

I was looking at this lot:
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
AMD FX-8350 4GHz
G-Skill 32GB (8x4GB) DDR3 1866MHz
WD 1TB 3.5" SATA-III Caviar Green
Sapphire HD 6450 512MB
CIT 650w Power supply
AvP Triton Mid Tower Black Blue

Total of £611.82 on Ebuyer

Statistics: Posted by spears — Wed Jul 10, 2013 3:54 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-10T12:28:56+00:00

MrBrown wrote:

raw cpu power if you need bulk is cheaper online (via hosting providers, either cloud or arrays of dedicated), than actual hardware you may want to purchase.

I don't agree. Depending on your needs and the time requirements, online can be quite a bit more expensive than purchasing a server/workstation outright.

Statistics: Posted by cantina — Wed Jul 10, 2013 12:28 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-10T11:28:44+00:00

what sort of number crunching do you have in mind? simulating all atoms in the universe?

evaluating possible hands?

what is the number of computations you want per second?

Have you considered impact of montecarlo on your planned computation? is 0.01% accuracy reasonable trade-off for the reward of 500ms calculation compared to 20min calculation?

raw cpu power if you need bulk is cheaper online (via hosting providers, either cloud or arrays of dedicated), than actual hardware you may want to purchase.

what is the lifespan intended use of this number cruncher? perhaps 'hosted' solution is more expensive if you plan to run cruncher for 12 years..?

average i5 should be enough for any crunching you need in less than 1000ms, when it comes to poker evaluations.

Statistics: Posted by MrBrown — Wed Jul 10, 2013 11:28 am

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-04T10:20:41+00:00

I wonder how well something like piCloud would work for CFRM. It would be incredibly slow to update your regrets, but you could run many many iterations in parallel.

Statistics: Posted by cantina — Thu Jul 04, 2013 10:20 am

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-07-04T04:26:37+00:00

Another interesting service: http://www.picloud.com/
I didn't check the prices and how they compare to other services such as Amazon EC2.

Statistics: Posted by nemesis17 — Thu Jul 04, 2013 4:26 am

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-27T18:54:39+00:00

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-t7600/pd

Statistics: Posted by Nose — Mon May 27, 2013 6:54 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-08T03:34:50+00:00

HontoNiBaka wrote:

Are there any drawbacks, that makes renting a machine with lots of RAM impractical?

Transfering a lot of data can be cumbersome (I'm seeing transfers around 700 KB/sec) , although there is a service for shipping data on physical hard drives to/from AWS S3.

Statistics: Posted by PolarBear — Wed May 08, 2013 3:34 am

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-08T02:41:12+00:00

PolarBear wrote:

Nasher wrote:

PolarBear wrote:

Nominal EC2 prices are high, but you can rent really cheap machines on the spot market - I'm currently renting 8 core 68 GB RAM machines for $0.15/h.

That must be linux.

Intel computers seem to perform better for number crunching. You might look up performance comparisons for the different processors you had in mind.

Yeah that's for Linux machines.
The CPUs are somewhat dated Intel Xeons (definitely slower per-core than my desktop i7-3770K), but still, for infrequent large jobs this offer is hard to beat - renting 400 cores for a couple days (that's my use case lately) costs pennies compared to their price. If the algo that OneDay wants to use is parallelizable across multiple machines, going massive with a farm of rented spot machines is definitely something I'd consider.

Sounds, like this would be great for computing NEQs with a high number of buckets, definitelly sounds easier than connecting 4 computers in a LAN, which was my original idea. Are there any drawbacks, that makes renting a machine with lots of RAM impractical?

Statistics: Posted by HontoNiBaka — Wed May 08, 2013 2:41 am

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-04T20:32:25+00:00

Nasher wrote:

You set a max price you're willing to pay, then just accept the current spot price. The trouble is, if somebody later buys out all the server capacity, essentially outbidding you, the instance gets shut down and no new data is saved. <-- This happened to me last week. I think you can preserve your disk instance somehow in case that happens. I'm not entirely sure how to do that, though. You can create an instance and save a disk image (AMI) with your app on it, but that's done manually.

It's possible to make the disk persistent, so work isn't lost - I think it set when creating the image.

Statistics: Posted by PolarBear — Sat May 04, 2013 8:32 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-04T04:40:59+00:00

Gnomikian wrote:

Why not use a good gpu instead ? you'll get about 15x performance than cpu for number crushing.

Only if the problem is parallelizable - which his isn't

Statistics: Posted by spears — Sat May 04, 2013 4:40 am

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-03T23:16:47+00:00

Statistics: Posted by cantina — Fri May 03, 2013 11:16 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-03T22:38:51+00:00

yes, but afaik you don't have direct control over the fact when your VM is running or stopped. So for instance you make a bid and the price is currently too high. Hours later it reaches the price and you automatically get the instance booked, but how to start the cruncher automatically? Do you have to take care of it via the OS mechanisms for startup? Or do you create an instance, start the process, hibernate it and pass it the spot market so its executed as soon as there's capacity available for your price?

Statistics: Posted by proud2bBot — Fri May 03, 2013 10:38 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-03T22:15:01+00:00

proud2bBot wrote:

GPUs aren't performing well if the workload doesn't fit into the memory afaik.

Regarding EC2: How does it work when using the spot instances: do you need to setup your number cruncher in the auto start of the OS?

AFAIK GPU are rather primitive creatures, for example don't have the ability for recurrence (which is essential for typical tree-traversing algorithms).

Spot machines are just like regular machines - you create them from from an image, which can be either a vanilla Linux image provided by amazon or an image you've prepared yourself (by making a snapshot of another instance earlier).

Statistics: Posted by PolarBear — Fri May 03, 2013 10:15 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-03T21:22:06+00:00

Statistics: Posted by proud2bBot — Fri May 03, 2013 9:22 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-03T19:48:21+00:00

Why not use a good gpu instead ? you'll get about 15x performance than cpu for number crushing.

Regards

Statistics: Posted by Gnomikian — Fri May 03, 2013 7:48 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-03T16:11:25+00:00

Speaking of getting your own machine, it's possible now to get a strong machine (CPU-wise) which is absolutely noiseless (no moving parts except the CD drive) for a reasonable price (I got mine for about $2k from quietpc.com). It's great for people who are annoyed by their botting machines making constant noises in their bedroom/living room.

Statistics: Posted by PolarBear — Fri May 03, 2013 4:11 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-03T05:35:47+00:00

It's not currently parallelizable across multiple machines, and I foresee this doing a lot of number crunching for a long time. So I don't think rented power is the best way to go in the long run.

+ Once I'm done number crunching, I get my next Dev machine for free!

Statistics: Posted by OneDayItllWork — Fri May 03, 2013 5:35 am

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-02T20:46:22+00:00

Nasher wrote:

PolarBear wrote:

Nominal EC2 prices are high, but you can rent really cheap machines on the spot market - I'm currently renting 8 core 68 GB RAM machines for $0.15/h.

That must be linux.

Intel computers seem to perform better for number crunching. You might look up performance comparisons for the different processors you had in mind.

Statistics: Posted by PolarBear — Thu May 02, 2013 8:46 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-02T20:24:11+00:00

PolarBear wrote:

Nominal EC2 prices are high, but you can rent really cheap machines on the spot market - I'm currently renting 8 core 68 GB RAM machines for $0.15/h.

That must be linux.

Intel computers seem to perform better for number crunching. You might look up performance comparisons for the different processors you had in mind.

Statistics: Posted by cantina — Thu May 02, 2013 8:24 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-02T14:30:42+00:00

Nominal EC2 prices are high, but you can rent really cheap machines on the spot market - I'm currently renting 8 core 68 GB RAM machines for $0.15/h.

Statistics: Posted by PolarBear — Thu May 02, 2013 2:30 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-02T13:42:37+00:00

Nasher wrote:

What's "a reasonable price"?

I'm looking at a complete build for under £1000 - the cheaper the better.

I was looking at this lot:
Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
AMD FX-8350 4GHz
G-Skill 32GB (8x4GB) DDR3 1866MHz
WD 1TB 3.5" SATA-III Caviar Green
Sapphire HD 6450 512MB
CIT 650w Power supply
AvP Triton Mid Tower Black Blue

Total of £611.82 on Ebuyer

Obviously for a number cruncher, graphics and drive speed are not a concern.

The FX-8350 with 8 cores for £156.64 is very tempting compared to the Intel Core i7 2700K for £274.54 with 8 threads. But I was wondering if it'd be worth the extra money, or even the Intel Core i7 3930K with 12 threads for £466.12. I don't really know what the performance comparisons would be like.

I noticed that my current fictitious play implementation runs more than twice as fast on my i7 laptop, as it does on my AMD 1090T desktop, Both running 4 threads. I don't know if that's likely to be purely down the to the CPU - or issues with the desktop setup.

Edit: Or the Intel Xeon E3-1275v2 for £273.03

I've always done AMD builds in the past - so I'm fairly unfamiliar with the Intel world.

Statistics: Posted by OneDayItllWork — Thu May 02, 2013 1:42 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-02T13:19:55+00:00

What's "a reasonable price"?

Statistics: Posted by cantina — Thu May 02, 2013 1:19 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-02T12:30:59+00:00

Wouldn't take too long before I may as well have bought a high end machine myself.

Statistics: Posted by OneDayItllWork — Thu May 02, 2013 12:30 pm

Re: CPU for number crunching

2013-05-02T11:12:21+00:00

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

Statistics: Posted by spears — Thu May 02, 2013 11:12 am

CPU for number crunching

2013-05-02T10:20:00+00:00

I've done a bit of Googling, and there's a fair amount of contradictory information, so I was hoping someone with knowledge could help me out.

What CPU should I get for decent number crunching performance? (At a reasonable price)

Statistics: Posted by OneDayItllWork — Thu May 02, 2013 10:20 am