What VM type for choose for my board game solver based on AlphaBeta search

Question

I completed my 2 player board game using Negamax with AlphaBeta prunning and transposition table. Now I need to completely solve the game for many predefined positions in order to create opening book file. I chose to use cloud based VM solution for that job. It will be long running process, for at least a month. What would be optimal hardware requirements?
In memory optimized or computing optimized VM or some else?

Answer 1

Hello, @stefan stefanov !

What VM should I use for Negamax with alpha beta pruning and transposition tables?
As a quick disclaimer, I have limited familiarity when it comes to Negamax with alpha beta pruning and transposition tables however this appears to be a highly compute intensive operation. Let's take a quick look at the compute optimized options:

• Compute optimized (F-series): Higher CPU to memory ratio and are typically used for servers and batch processes.
• GPU accelerated compute (N-series): GPU optimized for compute/graphics intensive and visualization workloads.
• FPGA accelerated compute (NP-series): Specialized VMs optimized for workloads including machine learning inference, video transcoding, and database search & analytics.
• High performance compute (H-series): Compute optimized for high performance such as fluid dynamics, explicit and implicit finite element analysis, weather modeling, seismic processing, reservoir simulation, and RTL simulation.

Additional references:

• Complete list of Azure VM sizes
• Complete list of Azure VM pricing
• Azure VMs available by region

As far as the actual VM recommendation is concerned, that's going to depend quite heavily on exactly what you want to accomplish so you'll need to know what your CPU or GPU requirements are, how much storage you'll need to use for your game, what your budget is, and likely a number of other things that will vary from project to project.

To get you pointed in the right direction, GPUs appear to be better geared for Negamax than CPUs so I would start looking at the GPU optimized VMs however you'll need to keep region availability in mind as well as GPU acceleration is in high demand.

I hope this has been helpful and best of luck with your board game!