Pi counted to 5 trillionth digit, 90 days and one spec'd out custom rig later
By Ross Miller 
posted August 7th 2010 1:31AM
posted August 7th 2010 1:31AM
posted August 7th 2010 1:31AM
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I was that kid.
@Joseph9307
I believe it.
@ok why is android ugly
I own a FAST PC, haven't personally owned a mac since my 604e powermac, but seriously?
sure a mac could do it, for christs sake, are you suggesting that windows server 2008 "owns" this field? or that mac hardware only supports a measly 32gb of ram? who gives a crap... I guess its a hardware feat of the motherboard manufacturer more than anything and congrats to the guys who did it... apple is completely irrelevant in this conversation and shouldn't be slammed for not doing it first, lol
@jmhalder The most important part of trolling is to pick a target that has nothing to do with the topic at hand, and then come up with a ridiculous and patently false claim about said topic.
@ok why is android ugly Thanks for the most irrelevant comment I will read today. It's people like you that make the world the way it is. If you are an example, humanity is doomed.
@Joseph9307
You couldn't go one more number?
Is thats a pie behind the PC
@Joseph9307
You were that girl Joseph????
@jmhalder
Apple should always be slammed...on principle...
@Stormstrike
One serious custom rig......and PIE! cannot go wrong there.
@MoonWalkerCTE its an Apple Pie!
@FuturismRave Looks pumpkin to me
The 10-digit string leading up to the 950 trillionth digits are 7840928364.
Prove me wrong.
I wish people would use CPU power for useful things. Can't they run a 3D scene through Maxwell or something? Then we'd be able to at least admire the result.
@MoonWalkerCTE He cooked the pie on the pc.
@Joseph9307
I love turtles
@MoonWalkerCTE That pie has actually been inserted into the pc. how else do you expect the computer run any calculations on it?
@tophat and some of the other posters before me...
ROFLMAO!!!!
But you've got to give this up for those trollers... If not for them, you would not be able to give out such amazingly funny comments and make people such as me laugh out so loud that people around me think I'm going bonkers reading an article on Pi!!!
Thanks for making my day!
@Darkroom No it's app from the android marketplace that steals your personal information and prank calls your grandma /cock
@MoonWalkerCTE
The pie is a LIE!! GTFO
Where does all that memory fit?!
@tyjb9x
I'm wondering why they didn't use that $18,000 budget and expertise to set up nVidia CUDA powered rig and get this done in
...in less than 24 hours.
Cut off for some reason.
@tyjb9x
8 gig cards X 12 slots. I can see it. Insane and wholly unnecessary, but doable. I don't think he needed 96gb of ram for this project. Couldn't virtual memory have done the same thing? Unless speed was an issue. Hmm... Probably now that I think of it.
God. Can you imagine a three way SLI with one of those nine monitor hookups playing diner da...... Ahem... Crysis?
@Stratus41298 or you could go with some ati and have over 24 displays as 1
nvidia sucks ass. crappiest drivers iv ever used. probubly why they never used the cuda crap
and before someone goes saying i dont know anything about nvidia drivers, i will enlighten them that nvidia drivers have
a. disabled sli for all older cards below, i think the 8 series. meaning the dual 6800 rig that would probubly play tf2 file is now useless and i had to buy a new card, becuase they disabled sli for it.
b. disabled physx for anyone that has an ati card. this does not include only people using an nvidia video card for physx, it now also includes the origional agea ppu cards. pretty much a dick move eh?
also, there control panel is an utter pos, it hasnt been updated in how many years?.
sorry for the rant, nvidia jsut pisses me off.
@Almo
My understanding of computers is kinda limited, but I believe CUDA excels at parallel processing where each processor takes a set of local data and runs a calculation independent of other processors, so you see performance enhancements in algorithms where you can decouple calculations (such as in image processing, CFD, etc). Calculation of Pi in modern computers (I think) involves the calculation of a series. As such, each calculational step must wait for data from the previous step. While there may be some simultaneous operations, there is a limit to how many cores you can utilize to speed up the operation. I've been told you can use an FFT to calculate PI, and I know there is some work being done on optimizing the FFT through parallelization, but I'm not familiar with that.
But the short answer to why not a CUDA rig.. probably b/c it would not help.
@Almo
You'd either be HDD limited to death or RAM limited.
By using 2 6 core Xeon CPUs, you have less bottleneck and more RAM.
@Stratus41298 Yes, because 2346923649 FPS is never enough! (:
@Almo I think 1 Billion numbers in 5 minutes is fairly impressive.
"The first scalable multi-threaded Pi-benchmark for multi-core systems...
Against the Big Guns...
Faster than SuperPi on single-core...
Faster than PiFast 4.3 on dual-core...
Faster than QuickPi 4.5 on quad-core...
1 billion digits of Pi in 5 minutes on 6-core Core i7 @ 4.26 GHz"
@someguy
This software seems capable of multi-threading math equations, but their probably is a limit to how successfully it can do multi-threading after 2 cores, maybe some major diminishing returns.
@both, I'd guess this guy built this computer with this sole purpose and software suite in mind. He probably talked to the software developer ahead of time and was told how to build the ultimate machine to do said number crunching.
@tyjb9x
With TWO Titan Fenrirs, I have no idea!
@someguy7234 Yes, very 'limited' (!)
I see 2 cpus, I would rather play some TF2 than to know all the numbers of pi
@Cainhunpi
Well good thing there are people better than you out there pushing science along or you couldnt play TF2
@satn
♪ Because I've got experiments to run and research to be done for people to play TF2 ♪
@Apeman96
I said people dammit!
Apeman96 is a pretty cool guy eh confuses his meme's and doesnt afraid of anything
@Cainhunpi Alexander J. Yee and Shigeru Kondo are credit to team!
Irrational
And it still doesn't run Crysis...
Not surprising considering it doesn't have a graphics card.
@einhanderkiller
It had to have one... or else how would you know when it finished?
@d3sc3nd3ncy
On board display outputs or remote desktop
90 days of praying the power doesn't go out...
@Ithacus
Bahahahahaha
*wipes a tear*, yeah.
@Ithacus
Wha? How often does your power go out? Seems like you need to pray to another mythical god. Teslacus?
@Ithacus
I'm sure they had backup batteries, they'd be insane not to.
@Almo
University of Illinois lost power last year for about 8 hrs. I know a lot of research that got screwed up when the UPS's ran out. Power losses happen... Also undergrads flipping switches on power strips and touching shit they shouldn't also happens.
@someguy7234 I remember at my school we had to interview the Miami heat and we blew the circuit on the third floor cause all the lights we used. (7 simultaneous interviews in different rooms)
@Ithacus if you'd have read the source they say that it can recover from that and continue from a checkpoint.
saw this on giz? like a week ago
@lars1110
All hail the Troll from the future.
http://gizmodo.com/5606273/this-computer-just-calculated-pi-to-a-world-record-5-trillion-digits
God forbid blogs post things at different times.