

Homemade computer calculates pi to 10 trillion digits - Thrymr
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/23/141629745/homemade-computer-sets-records-in-the-trillions

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codejoust
More information about the setup:
<http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-5t/details.html>

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mrleinad
Could anyone jump in and provide some information on how calculating pi to a
gazillion digits is worth the effort?

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brianobush
It is about pushing limits with a home computer. The processor itself was a 12
core Xeon processor, but all of the storage required - both RAM and disk is
quite impressive.

I am working on a similar brute-force analysis, but I have access to a
datacenter with many machines. Not so impressive.

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ithkuil
I never considered the details of Pi digit calculation, but I was surprised to
see how it's very dependent on IO:

"For large computations, the bottleneck is either memory bandwidth or disk
bandwidth depending on the number of hard drives and their configuration."

