GTX Titan video cards

[daniel71]

Does using GTX Titan video cards process any chess instructions that could be useful in chess? I may use 2x GTX 1080 watercooled cards or just a single card, it depends on what advice I get tonight! NewEgg has a GTX 1080 card in stock today and need to jump on it before they are gone. So a Titan vs GTX 1080 will Cuda cores benifit a 2x Xeon workstation? Thanks Daniel

[ZirconiumX]

In a word: no.

Chess is not at all suited for GPUs because it has really bad issues with warp divergence and conditional branches.

That being said, some people have given it a try - Pigeon can use CUDA, I believe.

[Dann Corbit]

Srdja wrote a chess program that runs on GPU.
It is of decent strength.

Ankan Banerjee wrote the world's fastest perft calculation on a GPU:
https://github.com/ankan-ban/perft_gpu

If the perft engine were to be used with a proof search, I think it would create the world's fastest mate solver (because a perft engine by definition knows if a position is won, lost, or drawn).

However, with current software, there is no killer chess app for the GPU.

[daniel71]

Thanks everybody of your comments. NewEgg only allows 1 Gtx 1080 card to a customer for 48 hours so I may not order another one if they get sold out. For those that are interested I purchased a
http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemn ... 6814125878

They have some concerns about noisy water pumps so I will see what happens. Also searching for these cards don't show up like they should. Fritz should look great in 4k.

[Dann Corbit]

Thanks everybody of your comments. NewEgg only allows 1 Gtx 1080 card to a customer for 48 hours so I may not order another one if they get sold out. For those that are interested I purchased a
http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemn ... 6814125878

They have some concerns about noisy water pumps so I will see what happens. Also searching for these cards don't show up like they should. Fritz should look great in 4k.

Those cards can also be used for lots of interesting online experiments like GIMPS:
http://www.mersenne.org/

and like protein folding:
http://folding.stanford.edu/
http://fold.it/portal/info/about

and like all these BOINC projects:
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/GPU_computing

The gimps project may reward you with money
The protein folding project may save 100,000 lives per year.
etc

[daniel71]

I thought about these things and Bit coin mining but they say it cost more for the electricity than you can make mining. SetI is another way to donate time if still are doing research.

[Dann Corbit]

I thought about these things and Bit coin mining but they say it cost more for the electricity than you can make mining. SetI is another way to donate time if still are doing research.

Bitcoin is almost always used for immoral purposes anyway, typically extortion. Why do sellers and buyers want to hide during a transaction if everything is legal?

[ankan]

Apart from more memory (12 GB vs 8 GB) the titan cards don't offer any benefits over GTX 1080. Also depends on which Titan card you get.
In case you decide on a Titan card, make sure you get the latest nvidia titan X (pascal based) card.
The GTX 1080 should be significantly faster than all other titan cards (Titan, Titan Black, Titan Z and the original Maxwell generation titan X).

For perft calculations, more memory could be useful for storing bigger transposition tables.

On a system with three GTX Titan X (pascal) GPUs, my program takes about 12 hours for perft(13) computation:

Code: Select all

Perft(09):       2439530234167, time:    1.466 s
Perft(10):      69352859712417, time:   14.794 s
Perft(11):    2097651003696806, time:  172.691 s
Perft(12):   62854969236701747, time:  2909.86 s
Perft(13): 1981066775000396239, time:  43469.7 s

On another system with a single GTX 1080 (overclocked to ~2050 Mhz), it takes about 2 days for the same computation:

Code: Select all

Perft(09):       2439530234167, time:    3.103 s
Perft(10):      69352859712417, time:   39.656 s
Perft(11):    2097651003696806, time:  597.844 s
Perft(12):   62854969236701747, time:  10303.8 s
Perft(13): 1981066775000396239, time:   167716 s

I am currently running perft(14) on the first system. The computation is expected to take 10-15 days.

[Dann Corbit]

Apart from more memory (12 GB vs 8 GB) the titan cards don't offer any benefits over GTX 1080. Also depends on which Titan card you get.
In case you decide on a Titan card, make sure you get the latest nvidia titan X (pascal based) card.
The GTX 1080 should be significantly faster than all other titan cards (Titan, Titan Black, Titan Z and the original Maxwell generation titan X).

For perft calculations, more memory could be useful for storing bigger transposition tables.

On a system with three GTX Titan X (pascal) GPUs, my program takes about 12 hours for perft(13) computation:

Code: Select all

Perft(09):       2439530234167, time:    1.466 s
Perft(10):      69352859712417, time:   14.794 s
Perft(11):    2097651003696806, time:  172.691 s
Perft(12):   62854969236701747, time:  2909.86 s
Perft(13): 1981066775000396239, time:  43469.7 s

On another system with a single GTX 1080 (overclocked to ~2050 Mhz), it takes about 2 days for the same computation:

Code: Select all

Perft(09):       2439530234167, time:    3.103 s
Perft(10):      69352859712417, time:   39.656 s
Perft(11):    2097651003696806, time:  597.844 s
Perft(12):   62854969236701747, time:  10303.8 s
Perft(13): 1981066775000396239, time:   167716 s

I am currently running perft(14) on the first system. The computation is expected to take 10-15 days.

It would be very interesting to see stats from the first 14 plies for things like checkmates in each ply, and percent of positions resulting in checkmate

[bhamadicharef]

Ankan ... could you please give us your expert GPU view on the following

1) does perft_gpu would run on a Tesla K80 ? I think you are using some
3x Titan X GPU for perft14, from what I read on the forum.

2) estimate how long if would take for 8x Tesla K80 (in a Xeon-based 64-bit
server with 6-cores and 64 GB RAM) to do perft14 from initial position ? or
from unique(7) positions

Brahim @ Singapore