Checking in with another update on the progress of the Eternity II solver. Progress has been pretty good for the past six months, though we’re starting to hit more bottlenecks, probably as we’re getting more data in the database. Currently my cluster is not processing as I do some maintenance on it, which is taking a lot longer than I expected.
I got a new machine with a Threadripper as a main device, and so decided to throw it at this job instead of just the cluster. That results in a significant uptick in processing due to the raw compute of the Threadripper (woo hoo!). As you can see we’re over 150 million boards, with about 28% of the boards that have been found already processed. This is a decrease in the percentage of boards processed from 36% back in January. Seems we’re still generating boards faster than we can investigate them.
For depth, we’re seeing a similar trend, but we are getting a little deeper into the search graph. About half of the boards are at depth 24 or better, an improvement of 1 since January. In fact, on June 6 we finished processing the last of the board with 19 tiles placed, so all active boards have at least 20 tiles, pretty good progress from the bottom. As for progress at the top, that was an early find. On January 27th a board was found with 154 pieces placed. An improvement by 4, but, I was hoping to see more improvement over the latter five months.