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Next: 14.3.3 Parallel Alpha-Beta Pruning Up: 14.3 Computer Chess Previous: The Endgame

14.3.2 Parallel Computer Chess: The Hardware

Our program is implemented on an nCUBE/10 system. This is an MIMD (multiple instruction stream, multiple data stream) multicomputer, with each node consisting of a custom VLSI  processor running at 7 MHz, 512 Kbytes of memory, and on-chip communication channels. There is no shared  memory-processors communicate by message-passing. The nodes are connected as a hypercube but the VERTEX message-passing software [nCUBE:87a] gives the illusion of full connectivity. The nCUBE system at Caltech has 512 processors, but systems exist with as many as 1024 processors. The program is written in C, with a small amount of assembly code.



Guy Robinson
Wed Mar 1 10:19:35 EST 1995