MMMM...PI
I've wanted to do a distributed program for a long time. I'm thinking of buying some old computers and hooking them up into a small cluster at home. Of course I will need to code a program to compute PI.

If you want something that is already coded, check the Pi Hex page.

I believe that the current record is at Quadrillion. If you can find a better record, let me know.

If 1 byte = 1 character and 1 megabyte = 1 048 576 bytes, then 1 Quadrillion bytes =

1 * 10^18 bytes = 953674316406.25 MB.

1 terabyte = 1 099 511 627 776 byte => 10^18bytes = 909494.7017729282379150390625 Terrabytes.

Thats almost 1000 Terrabytes. :-)

[UPDATE] As Vijay points out, its 100,000 Terrabytes. DAM THESE EYES OF MINE!!!

Interesting fact, books in the largest library in the world, the U.S. Library of Congress, contain about 20 terabytes of text.


Nowdays there are supercomputers that can compute at 30 terraflops a second. Thats 30 trillion floating point instructions a second. If only I could build one of those then computing PI would be so much faster :-)
- posted by Sushant Bhatia @ 9:18 PM