Multithreaded Pi Program on XS

[allegratorial]

iknowbetter
Posts: 1

Funny. Looks like someone was bold enough to create the account just to make that post.

[knopflerbruce]

What would be nice to have is a program that would work this way: rank based on number of pi digits computed in (fixed time) seconds. That one would last "forever", since the score would increse with time, not approach zero, as we see with superpi 1m, and especially wprime32m. No idea if that's doable with this app, though...

[allegratorial]

I like that idea. makes it more like 3DMark.

It probably isn't doable directly, but it something more like a binary search sort might work to find the largest computation that can be done in say xx minutes.

I'll ask author about this to see if he is interested.

One problem I can forsee right off the bat is that faster computers might not have enough ram to do it.
Suppose the benchmark is to find the largest computation that can be done in xx minutes, there will be a problem if the largest computation that will fit into ram is shorter than that.

[knopflerbruce]

Originally Posted by allegratorial

I like that idea. makes it more like 3DMark.

It probably isn't doable directly, but it something more like a binary search sort might work to find the largest computation that can be done in say xx minutes.

I'll ask author about this to see if he is interested.

One problem I can forsee right off the bat is that faster computers might not have enough ram to do it.
Suppose the benchmark is to find the largest computation that can be done in xx minutes, there will be a problem if the largest computation that will fit into ram is shorter than that.

But I guess it's not the intention that all tests on HWBot can be run on any CPU back to 486's, so as long as it won't need more than 4GB I think it's ok.

[allegratorial]

Here's the relevant part of his response.
(I've re-worded a few things to fill in the context.)

It's an interesting idea, but it deviates too far from the original goals as a research project:

1. Break [a few world records] and provide some more numerical evidence on the irrationality of [Catalan's Constant] and [Euler's Constant].

2. Show that high-precision arithmetic can be efficiently paralleled.

3. Make a decent multi-threaded Pi-program.

As for the memory problem... lol... I would say it'd be pretty bad. The longest thing I can fit comfortably under 6GB of ram takes like ~12 minutes on [dual X5482]...

I can't expect everyone to have more than 6GB right now since few people will overkill on ram.

So I guess that's a no.