Houdini 6 Pro and large pages

[Lion]

Hello

How do I know if Houdini 6 Pro uses my large pages?

rgds

[Houdini]

Houdini will send the message "info string XXX Large Page Hash".

You can also see it in the Task Manager, the Large Page memory is only visible as a Virtual Memory allocation (if I recall correctly).

Finally, you can try the "lp" command (after double-clicking on "Houdini 6.exe"). Houdini will try to create large page memory blocks of increasing size and shows a summary of the results.

[Lion]

Thanks.
But is there a option to tick in the engine menu?

[Houdini]

No, if Large Pages are available in Windows, Houdini 6 Pro will try to use them.

[Werewolf]

Not trying to hijack the thread, but is that also true of NUMA? So if H6 Pro is on a single CPU machine, there's no need to turn off NUMA? Is it automatic in its setting etc?

[Houdini]

Correct, there is no need to turn off NUMA if you're running on a system with only a single NUMA node.
The NUMA support will only make a difference if Houdini detects at least 2 NUMA nodes (as reported by the appropriate Windows function).

[CheckersGuy]

Correct, there is no need to turn off NUMA if you're running on a system with only a single NUMA node.
The NUMA support will only make a difference if Houdini detects at least 2 NUMA nodes (as reported by the appropriate Windows function).

How much stronger is Houdini with Numa and LP ?

[Dann Corbit]

Correct, there is no need to turn off NUMA if you're running on a system with only a single NUMA node.
The NUMA support will only make a difference if Houdini detects at least 2 NUMA nodes (as reported by the appropriate Windows function).

How much stronger is Houdini with Numa and LP ?

These sorts of things won't have simple answers.

I have a very old machine with NUMA, which won't be manged by the OS as well as new machines with NUMA.

Programs definitely need to be NUMA aware (see Ipman's tests).

LP makes things a few percent faster but it's not a big win. On the other hand, faster is faster. So why not?

[Houdini]

Correct, there is no need to turn off NUMA if you're running on a system with only a single NUMA node.
The NUMA support will only make a difference if Houdini detects at least 2 NUMA nodes (as reported by the appropriate Windows function).

How much stronger is Houdini with Numa and LP ?

It highly depends on the hardware, and in case of Large Pages, on the hash size used. Bigger hashes will benefit more from Large Pages.

You can find some real performance data for two systems (40-core dual Intel Xeon v4 and 24-core dual AMD Opteron 6174) in the User's Manual, see here: http://www.cruxis.com/chess/manual/houd ... ersion.htm

[CheckersGuy]

Correct, there is no need to turn off NUMA if you're running on a system with only a single NUMA node.
The NUMA support will only make a difference if Houdini detects at least 2 NUMA nodes (as reported by the appropriate Windows function).

How much stronger is Houdini with Numa and LP ?

It highly depends on the hardware, and in case of Large Pages, on the hash size used. Bigger hashes will benefit more from Large Pages.

You can find some real performance data for two systems (40-core dual Intel Xeon v4 and 24-core dual AMD Opteron 6174) in the User's Manual, see here: http://www.cruxis.com/chess/manual/houd ... ersion.htm

The 40-thread benchmark with numa is pretty impressive. Didn´t expect such a big difference.