Posted on 01/07/2010 9:34:37 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Perhaps the latest and greatest wonder of hardware overachievement is the story of French native Fabrice Bellard, who now holds the world record in PI calculation. He calculated Pi to 2.7 trillion decimal digits, surpassing mark of 2.5 trillion digits set in August by the T2K Open Supercomputer (which at the time was the 47th most powerful supercomputer in the world).
So what's so impressive about Mr. Bellard's feat, aside from its basic technical merits? He accomplished the number crunching, not on a supercomputer, but on a Nehalem-powered desktop.
His machine featured a Core i7 CPU running at 2.93 GHz, 6 GB of RAM, and five 1.5 Terabyte Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 model hard drives (for a total of 7.5 TB). The system ran the 64-bit Red Hat Fedora 10 distribution as its primary OS and used software RAID-0 and the ext4 file system.
The result takes up 1137 GB of storage and is (partially) available here. The computation took 103 days of computing time for the modest desktop.
The only time when Mr. Bellard had to enlist the help of other computers was during the verification.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailytech.com ...
fyi
*********************************************
December 31st, 2009
I am pleased to announce a new world record for the computation of the digits of Pi. The following number of digits were computed:
2242301460000 hexadecimal digits (base 16) 2699999990000 decimal digits (base 10)The base 10 result needs about 1137 GB(1) of storage. Parts of the result are available here.
Most of the computation was carried out on a single desktop computer costing less than 2000 euros. The previous records since 1995 were done using multi-million euro supercomputers.
Computation time:
The binary result was verified with a formula found by the author with the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe algorithm which directly gives the n'th hexadecimal digits of Pi. With this algorithm, the last 50 hexadecimal digits of the binary result were checked. A checksum modulo a 64 bit prime number done in the last multiplication of the Chudnovsky formula evaluation ensured a negligible probability of error.
The conversion from binary to base 10 was verified with a checksum modulo a 64 bit prime number.
More technical details are available here.
The verification of the binary digits used a network of 9 Desktop PCs during 34 hours. It could have been done on the same PC as the main computation by using 13 more days.
Some poor soul in hell was just given the job of verifying the results by hand.
That job will keep them busy and out of trouble for awhile.
Fabrice Bellard From Wikipedia,
*****************************EXCERPT*******************************
Fabrice Bellard is a computer programmer who is best known as the founder of FFmpeg and QEMU. He also developed quite a number of other programs, ranging from 3-D graphics to a compact C compiler, the Tiny C Compiler (aka tcc).
He was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France and went to school in Lycée Joffre (Montpellier), where he created a widely known program, the executable compressor LZEXE. After studying at l'École Polytechnique, in 1996 he specialized at Télécom Paris.
In 1997, he discovered the fastest formula to calculate single digits of pi in binary representation, known as Bellard's formula. It is a variant of the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula.[1]
Gérard Lantau, one of the listed creators of FFmpeg, is his alter ego.[citation needed]
Fabrice Bellard's entries won the the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) twice:[2]
In 2004 he wrote the TinyCC Boot Loader, which can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in less than 15 seconds.[3]
In 2005 he designed a system that could act as a Analog or DVB-T Digital TV transmitter by directly generating a VHF signal from a standard PC and VGA card.[4]
On 31st December 2009 he claimed the world record for calculations of Pi, having calculated it to 2,700 billion places. Slashdot wrote : "While the improvement may seem small, it is an outstanding achievement because only a single desktop PC, costing less than $3,000, was used — instead of a multi-million dollar supercomputer as in the previous records."[5][6]
***************************
Original Price: $549.99
You Save: $50.00
$499.99
Free Shipping*
We don’t know since they didn’t go as far....maybe they ran out of free time between funded projects.
[Some poor soul in hell was just given the job of verifying the results by hand.]
That would be me. They gave me a verrrry long string and told me to walk in a biggg circle and count the steps.
So by default a li'l ol' Core 10 lunchbucket gets it. That's kinda how it goes sometimes I reckon.
See my post at #10 - the supercomputer needed “only” 29 hours vs. 103 days for the PC. Still, an interesting achievement for the PC but still light years behind the supercomputer.
I did finally get around to installing Fedora 12 (LXDE spin) a couple days ago on both my laptop and netbook and I'm liking it. It is quite snappy - this distro may even (for the first time in my experience) give Windoze a run for it's money - but it's not that snappy.
I can’t wait until it is in a handle held model.
Well...let’s compare the cost of the supercomputer vs the cost of the desktop...
My Pi program is starting to bog down my computer.
Found this one to be interesting...:
QEMU is a processor emulator that relies on dynamic binary translation to achieve a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPU architectures.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.