Using the MPPA Architecture for UCT Parallelization

Abstract

We present here a study of the use of a Multi-Purpose Processor Array (MPPA) architecture for the parallelization of the UCT algorithm applied to the field of General Game Playing. We evaluate the constraints imposed by this architectureand show that the only parallelization of UCT proposed in the literature that is feasible on MPPA is aleaf parallelization. We show that the MPPA provides good scalability when increasing the size of the communications, which is useful whenusing synchronous communications to send large sets of game initial positions to be processed. We consider two approaches for the calculation of the playouts: the distributed computing of a playout on each cluster and the calculation of several playouts per cluster; we show that the second approach gives better results. Finally, we describe experiments concerning the thread management and present a surprising result: it is more efficient to revive threads than keep them aliveand try to communicate with them.

Publication
Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference on Game and Entertainment Technologies, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, 22-24 July, 2015