Man Takes Pi-Calculating Record From Supercomputer with Core i7 Desktop
Man Takes Pi-Calculating Record From Supercomputer with Core i7 Desktop
Posted 01/05/2010 at 2:45pm
| by Bart Salisbury
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There’s sort of a guilty pleasure in seeing the ‘masters of the universe’ knocked down a notch or two. So the news that the record for calculating Pi, set by the T2K Open Supercomputer, was not just broken but smashed by a lowly Core i7 machine was warmly received.
The feat was performed by Fabrice Bellard. He pieced together a system built around a Core i7 CPU running at 2.93 GHz, 6 GB of RAM, and five 1.5 TB Seagate Barracudas. His operating system of choice was the 64-bit version of Red Hat Fedora 10, along with a software RAID-0 and ext4 file system. He then started up a Pi algorithm based on the Chudnovsky formula and let it rip. One hundred and three days later he had Pi calculated out to 2.7 trillion decimal digits, blowing by the old record of 2.5 trillion decimal digits. The resulting number took 1137 GB of storage space.
Bellard made use of this single CPU for the initial calculation, but did get some help from 'friends' when verifying his calculation. Using the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe algorithm and a network of nine computers, he validated his result in 34 hours. (Using the PC would have taken 13 days--time Bellard didn’t want to use in case his record was broken before he got a chance to announce it.)
If you are morbidly curious, part of the result if available online.
Image Credit: Fabrice Bellard
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June 24, 2011 at 7:28am
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May 12, 2011 at 5:55am
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bintangkecil
March 29, 2011 at 11:49pm
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Bilbert
January 06, 2010 at 8:50pm
Pi = 3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971 6939937510 etc.
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keithfreitag
January 05, 2010 at 5:34pm
Not a math nut or anything but does Pi have an END?
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Queenof1
January 05, 2010 at 7:59pm
nope. I forgot the name of this kind of decimal but does not terminate.
Matt_Rapp
January 05, 2010 at 4:43pm
Just wait till some one lets an i9 run for a hundered days, even better two of them with 24 GB of DDR3 on one of EVGA's new dual socket boards. : )
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