August 8th, 2014

I am still working on automatic tuning, using the methodology outlined in last month's blog. I have written some bash and python scripts that allow the evaluation step in a tuning run (using NOMAD) to execute on multiple machines in parallel (NOMAD itself has some options for parallelism, but that is for doing multiple different evaluations in parallel. Mine does one evaluation at a time, but does it in parallel).

I have done a little bit of tuning on king safety parameters and am currently working on some search parameters, such as futility pruning. The extension/reduction code in Arasan is also complex and I have not changed it for a while - I suspect that is not optimal.

I have aquired another machine for use in testing and tuning. It is a used Lenovo D20 with dual Xeon 5650s (2 x 6 cores). It was set up to run Windows. I installed Linux on it, since most of my scripts run on Linux only. That was a bit tricky because the machine had a hardware RAID setup and Linux did not recognize the disks properly. I did some Googling and found that one way to make it work was to install a SATA disk drive on one of the so-called optical ports (which really take any SATA device) and put the Linux system, or at least the bootloader, on that disk. So I did that and it worked. Right now the RAID disks are disabled but I have a 500MB drive, so I don't really need them.