Friday, March 07, 2008

Distributed pi

The record for the largest number of hexadecimal digits of pi calculated stands at one trillion, and was computed on a single supercomputer.

However, with the BBP formula, I can imagine that record being surpassed with a distributed computation, with each computer working on a small portion, and not needing a lot of RAM or storage or communication.

One could finish it off with a Bittorrent like interface for people to download the final result. The final result itself need not be stored all in one place.

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