Chess program using the GPU?

[Geolm]

Hi,

I am a game developper, specialized in rendering, so I heard about gpgpu (i.e General Purpose programming using the GPU). I work in a studio where we use CUDA from nvidia to make the gpu do some nasty job ten times faster than the CPU (even with a quadcore). I don't have time to try an implementation of a chess engine using the GPU, but has anyone try ? If you're interested, you can download cuda or directly drive directX 10. By the way, before someone asks me : "yes, integer are supported", see shader model 4.

Cheers
Guillaume

[Carey]

I don't know if anybody has actually tried it, but I know a lot of people have thought about it.

Even Larry Atkins, of Northwestern's CHESS program fame, has wondered about using a GPU or a Cell processors, etc. for chess.

I know that some people have done some number crunching on both of them.

So it is possible. It's just whether or not anybody would really want to write for that specialized of a system.

[Geolm]

IMHO using the cell of the PS3 or the 3-core x360 cpu is much easier than using the GPU, but to run a program on retail console you must have a signed executable from Microsoft or Sony That's why I think a gpu chess program could be used by more people (not only people with ps3/x360 dev kit). The hierarchy of a gpu engine will be very different, generating moves using a shader shouldn't be a problem, but the alpha-beta function will be tough. Does someone has already think how to avoid recursion in search method?

[Tony]

IMHO using the cell of the PS3 or the 3-core x360 cpu is much easier than using the GPU, but to run a program on retail console you must have a signed executable from Microsoft or Sony That's why I think a gpu chess program could be used by more people (not only people with ps3/x360 dev kit). The hierarchy of a gpu engine will be very different, generating moves using a shader shouldn't be a problem, but the alpha-beta function will be tough. Does someone has already think how to avoid recursion in search method?

I don't think the recursion is the problem. Manually creating stack shouldn't be too difficult.

My main worry is the looping over the moves. This looping is exactly what a gpu is not created for. It might throw away all speed gains.

Tony