This enables different Stockfish processes that use the same weights to use the
same memory. The approach establishes equivalence by memory content, and is
compatible with NUMA replication. The benefit of sharing is reduced memory usage
and a speedup thanks to improved (inter-process) caching of the network in the
CPUs cache, and thus reduced bandwidth usage to main memory. Even though this
change doesn't benefit a user running a single process, this helps on fishtest
or e.g. for Lichess, when multiple games run concurrently, or multiple
positions are analyzed in parallel.
This concept was probably first introduced in the Monty engine
(https://github.com/official-monty/Monty/pull/62), after a discussion in
https://github.com/official-stockfish/fishtest/issues/2077 on the issue of
memory pressure. Measurements based on Torch
(https://github.com/user-attachments/files/21386224/verbatim.pdf) further
suggested that large gains were possible. Multiple other engines have
adopted this 'verbatim' format as well.
The implementation here adds the flexibility needed for SF, for example, retains
the ability to bundle compressed networks with the binary, to load nets by uci
option, and to distribute the shared nets to the proper NUMA region. This
flexibility comes with a fair amount of complexity in the implementation, such
as OS specific code, and fallback code.
For most users this should be transparent. However, for example, those running
docker containers should ensure the `--ipc` flag is set correctly, and
`--shm-size` is sufficiently large.
The benefits of this patch significantly depend on hardware, with systems with
many cores and a large (O(150MB), the net size) L3 cache benefitting typically
most. On such systems SF speedups (as measured via nps playing games with
large concurrency but just 1 thread) can be 38%, which results in master vs.
patch Elo which gains about 25 Elo.
```
# PLAYER : RATING ERROR POINTS PLAYED (%)
1 shared_memoryPR : 24.8 1.9 39432.0 73728 53
2 master : 0.0 ---- 34296.0 73728 47
```
In a multithreaded setup, where weights are already shared, that benefit is smaller,
for example on the same HW as above, but with 8t for each side.
```
# PLAYER : RATING ERROR POINTS PLAYED (%)
1 shared_memoryPR : 5.2 3.5 9351.0 18432 51
2 master : 0.0 ---- 9081.0 18432 49
```
On fishtest with a typical hardware mix of our contributors, the following was measured:
STC, 60k games
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/69074a49ea4b268f1fac236c
Elo: 4.69 ± 1.4 (95%) LOS: 100.0%
Total: 60000 W: 16085 L: 15275 D: 28640
Ptnml(0-2): 154, 6440, 16053, 7148, 205
nElo: 9.38 ± 2.8 (95%) PairsRatio: 1.12
To verify correctness with a single process on a NUMA architecture,
speedtest was used, confirming near equivalence:
```
master: Average (over 10): 296236186
shared_memory: Average (over 10): 295769332
```
Currently, using large pages for the shared network weights is not always possible,
which can lead to a small slowdown (1-2%), in case a single process is run.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/6173
No functional change
Co-authored-by: disservin <disservin.social@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Joost VandeVondele <Joost.VandeVondele@gmail.com>
Removes some max calls
Some speedup stats, courtesy of @AndyGrant (albeit measured in an alternate implementation)
Dev 749240 nps
Base 748495 nps
Gain 0.100%
289936 games
STC:
LLR: 2.94 (-2.94,2.94) <-1.75,0.25>
Total: 203040 W: 52213 L: 52179 D: 98648
Ptnml(0-2): 480, 20722, 59139, 20642, 537
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/664805fe6dcff0d1d6b05f2ccloses#5261
No functional change
For each thread persist an accumulator cache for the network, where each
cache contains multiple entries for each of the possible king squares.
When the accumulator needs to be refreshed, the cached entry is used to more
efficiently update the accumulator, instead of rebuilding it from scratch.
This idea, was first described by Luecx (author of Koivisto) and
is commonly referred to as "Finny Tables".
When the accumulator needs to be refreshed, instead of filling it with
biases and adding every piece from scratch, we...
1. Take the `AccumulatorRefreshEntry` associated with the new king bucket
2. Calculate the features to activate and deactivate (from differences
between bitboards in the entry and bitboards of the actual position)
3. Apply the updates on the refresh entry
4. Copy the content of the refresh entry accumulator to the accumulator
we were refreshing
5. Copy the bitboards from the position to the refresh entry, to match
the newly updated accumulator
Results at STC:
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/662301573fe04ce4cefc1386
(first version)
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/6627fa063fe04ce4cefc6560
(final)
Non-Regression between first and final:
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/662801e33fe04ce4cefc660a
STC SMP:
https://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests/view/662808133fe04ce4cefc667c
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/5183
No functional change
This is another refactor which aims to decouple uci from stockfish. A new engine
class manages all engine related logic and uci is a "small" wrapper around it.
In the future we should also try to remove the need for the Position object in
the uci and replace the options with an actual options struct instead of using a
map. Also convert the std::string's in the Info structs a string_view.
closes#5147
No functional change
This PR proposes to change the parameter dependence of Stockfish's
internal WDL model from full move counter to material count. In addition
it ensures that an evaluation of 100 centipawns always corresponds to a
50% win probability at fishtest LTC, whereas for master this holds only
at move number 32. See also
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/4920 and the
discussion therein.
The new model was fitted based on about 340M positions extracted from
5.6M fishtest LTC games from the last three weeks, involving SF versions
from e67cc979fd (SF 16.1) to current
master.
The involved commands are for
[WDL_model](https://github.com/official-stockfish/WDL_model) are:
```
./updateWDL.sh --firstrev e67cc979fd
python scoreWDL.py updateWDL.json --plot save --pgnName update_material.png --momType "material" --momTarget 58 --materialMin 10 --modelFitting optimizeProbability
```
The anchor `58` for the material count value was chosen to be as close
as possible to the observed average material count of fishtest LTC games
at move 32 (`43`), while not changing the value of
`NormalizeToPawnValue` compared to the move-based WDL model by more than
1.
The patch only affects the displayed cp and wdl values.
closes https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/pull/5121
No functional change
Joost VandeVondele