Re:Homemade computer calculates pi to 10 trillion digits
by cletus on Sunday October 23, 2011 @01:11PM
(#3146617)
Indeed. Given that you with pi to 39 decimal places you can calculate the circumference of the universe the the accuracy of the size of a hydrogen atom [1] one does have to wonder.
Calculating pi is a fairly reasonable way of measuring CPU performance though. I've seen Anandtech and the like use SuperPi for this purpose.
In my first year of university we had to do (in Pascal) a library of arbitrary-precision functions for the arithmetic operations. It was really interesting at the time. If you measure something to a trillion digits you need a pretty good library for this. You also may not have the entire number of memory at a time (although a trillion digits is 0.5TB BCD-encoded so that's not inconceivable) so the problem itself has a lot of interesting aspects to it.
Calculating pi is a fairly reasonable way of measuring CPU performance though. I've seen Anandtech and the like use SuperPi for this purpose.
In my first year of university we had to do (in Pascal) a library of arbitrary-precision functions for the arithmetic operations. It was really interesting at the time. If you measure something to a trillion digits you need a pretty good library for this. You also may not have the entire number of memory at a time (although a trillion digits is 0.5TB BCD-encoded so that's not inconceivable) so the problem itself has a lot of interesting aspects to it.
[1]: http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=350023