Architecture
Hydra ran on a 32-node Intel Xeon with a Xilinx FPGA accelerator card cluster, with a total of 64 gigabytes of RAM. It evaluates about 150,000,000 chess positions per second, roughly the same as the 1997 Deep Blue which defeated Garry Kasparov, but with several times more overall computing power. Whilst FPGAs generally have a lower performance level than ASIC chips, modern-day FPGAs run about as fast as the older ASICs used for Deep Blue. The engine is on average able to evaluate up to a depth of about 18 ply (nine moves by each player), whereas Deep Blue only evaluated to about 12 ply on average. Hydra's search used alpha-beta pruning as well as null-move heuristics . The extra search depth over Deep Blue is due to its use of more modern type B forward pruning techniques that can miss some possibilities but generally play better due to the greater search depth permitted.
The Hydra computer was physically located in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, and was usually operated over a high speed optical fiber based network link.
Read more about this topic: Hydra (chess)
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