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Fastest way to get pi - 450 million places

Rubycon

Rubycon

Madame President
According to super pi, it takes 29 seconds for a 2.9GHz core (A64) to fetch a million places. At that rate it would take 13,050 seconds - 217 minutes and 30 seconds to achieve this goal. Using both cores (theoretically) would speed that up to half the time.

Well the download was 450MB. Some people could download that in a minute. On the connection I have (again theoretically) it would take 1 hour, 38 minutes and 18 seconds to reach the goal. Of course there is no more pi at foad.com probably because their hosting bill got pretty darn tall with all those folks downloading it. I burned the 450MB HTML file to cd back in 2000. :Q It was a ah heck to open with IE 5 on a Xeon 550 running NT 4.0 SP6 too.

So to summarize, even on a connection with a throughput of just over half a megabit sustained, one could get their 450 million digits of pi faster by downloading rather than calculating on their pc. Good thing Conroe is coming. 😉
 
So we have reached a level where download rates are greater than the calculation rates for decimal places for pi.

Still, I wonder if super pi uses the fastest algorithms for calculation decimal places of pi. I know that Ramanujan's amazing formulas have the fastest methods for calculating pi.
 
Originally posted by: chuckywang
So we have reached a level where download rates are greater than the calculation rates for decimal places for pi.

Still, I wonder if super pi uses the fastest algorithms for calculation decimal places of pi. I know that Ramanujan's amazing formulas have the fastest methods for calculating pi.
Click to expand...

Now THAT is a very interesting point as the program (super pi) is quite old. I'm sure it could be optimized to use specific processor features and (most importantly) SMP. Multi threaded versions of super pi would be nice. The old RC5 crack program (the one with the cow icon) will use every processor in the system automatically and it's quite old.

 
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