Performance Characterization of Parallel Game-tree Search Application Crafty

Game-tree search plays an important role in the field of Artificial Intelligence （AI）. In this paper, we characterize one parallel game-tree search workload in chess： the latest version of Crafty, a state of art program, on two Intel Xeon shared-memory multiprocessor systems. Our analysis shows that Crafty is latency-sensitive and the hash-table and dynamic tree splitting used in Crafty cause large scalability penalties. They consume 35%-50% of the running time on the 4-way system. Furthermore, Crafty is not bandwidth-limited.