cute-mpi-interface is an interface program to run curechess-cli on the cluster system with MPI. cutechess-cli is a command-line tool that can run that computer chess engine-to-engine tournaments. Testing the strength of a chess engine usually requires a tournament of a large number of games. With help of a cluster system, this procedure would become much faster. cute-mpi-interface is developed for doing this.
cute-mpi-interface is only tested under Unix/Linux environment. To run a MPI application, a MPI implementation should be install first. In this project, I use MPICH3. To install MPICH3, you can either download the MPICH official website to install from source code, or if you are under Ubuntu, simply run the command below:
$ sudo apt-get install libcr-dev mpich mpich-doc
To compile from the source, cd to project root directory, then run make to compile and generate the executable file:
$ cd cute-mpi-interface
$ make
Generally, the format of command to run cute-mpi-inferface is as follow:
mpiexec -np <Number-of-Processes> <Cute-mpi-inferface-Exefile-Path> -cuteexec <Cutechess-cli-Exefile-Path> <Cutechess-cli-Arguments>
where Number-of-Processes is just the number of processes (hosts) you want to do this job on the cluster system, while Cutechess-cli-Exefile-Path and Cutechess-cli-Arguments is the cutechess-cli executable file and the original cutechess-cli arguments.
Assuming that we want to run a tournament between Fruit and Stockfish with cutechess-cli, the original command for running cutechess-cli is
./cutechess-cli -rounds 40 -repeat -tournament gauntlet -pgnout fruit-vs-stockfish.pgn -openings file=8moves_GM.pgn format=pgn order=random plies=16 -engine name=fruit cmd=./fruit dir=./../engines/fruit21/ proto=uci restart=on -engine name=stockfish cmd=./stockfish dir=./../engines/stockfish6 proto=uci restart=on -each tc=40/240
Then the corresponding command you need for cute-mpi-inferface using 10 nodes will be
mpiexec -np 10 ./cute-mpi-interface -cuteexec ./cutechess-cli -rounds 40 -repeat -tournament gauntlet -pgnout fruit-vs-stockfish.pgn -openings file=8moves_GM.pgn format=pgn order=random plies=16 -engine name=fruit cmd=./fruit dir=./../engines/fruit21/ proto=uci restart=on -engine name=stockfish cmd=./stockfish dir=./../engines/stockfish6 proto=uci restart=on -each tc=40/240
-np <N>: MPICH3 option, launchNMPI workers in the cluster system.-cuteexec <path>: Set the executable file path of cutechess-cli to<path>.-shuffleopening: Shuffle the opening pgn file or not before doing splitting. Default value is false is this option is omitted.
-tournament <type>: In cutechess-cli, 4 types of tournaments are supported, but cute-mpi-interfance only supportsround-robinandgauntlet.-openings format=pgn: In cutechess-cli, 2 opening file formats are supported, but cute-mpi-interfance only supportspgn.
All other options of cutechess-cli can also be used in cute-mpi-interface.
When cute-mpi-inferface is running, it will do the following tasks in ordering:
- Parse argument to recognize the opening file and number of rounds
- Create a temporary folder with a name
tmp-xxxxxxxx, wherexxxxxxxxis a 64-bit random integer. - Segment the openning PGN file into N sub-files, where N = Number-of-Processes, and store them into the temporary folder. This is just to ensure that each sub-task must have different opennings.
- Segment the number of rounds in the original argument, and generate cmds for each sub-task. Here strategy of cute-mpi-interface of doing the splitting is to split the number of rounds. For example, if a task of three engines with 1000 rounds will be split to 50 sub-tasks, then each sub-task is a tournament of that three engines with 20 rounds.
- Run each sub-task on the clusters, and dump the game result pgn into the temporary folder.
- Merge all result pgn files into one, and delete the temporary folder.
Note that if any sub-task failed, or the entire MPI job failed due to some reason, you can still find the finished games in the temporary folder.
Chao Ma,
Sept. 2013.