Pi Segment NEWS!!

[gatekeeper53]

Hi Terry,

I'm recovering. Thank you!

IMO, I'd like to hold another half-year stage but it depends on some factors. First, Macwang, the provider of server have to agree to our plan of second stage. I have not discuss it with him but since he is so nice and enthusiastic in DC I think it's not a big problem. Second, I wonder how many users are willing to continue to participate in Pi Segment. Third, I'm not sure whether I have enough time to improve the project quickly before the next stage starts. As I ever said, I will release the source code of Pi Segment. That means I have to rewrite current client to avoid security problem. Also, I need to do some tests to confirm the system can bear the new task. These jobs will begin in May but unfortunately that's just the time I'll do the thesis defense which is important to my bachelor degree so it seems I may not have enough time to prepare the next stage of Pi Segment exclusively. Thus, it's very possible that the second will not begin just after current stage finished but delay for a month or even longer time.

For the score, I suggest it will be multiplied by a ratio and then sum to next stage. But it's only my point, not a decision. We need to discuss it with more people.

Thank you for your offer and I'm happy to be your guide when you came to Beijing.

Regards,
Jianan Hao

[Evil-Dragon]

Does anyone know how long it took the original record holder to hit 20 billion figures of Pi?

If the current production levels stand it might get Jianan into the record books, not only for the biggest pi numbers but also the quickest in history (not excluding all us crunchers obviously!)

[Steve Lux]

Well, Distributed Computing does equate to the world's largest and fastest computer.

[gatekeeper53]

It sure does and I think he has plenty of ammo to go back to his superiors and make a case for looser limits on his project and all other projects now.

[leavitron]

I hope this gets him some serious honors. The competition has been keen, but the real goal has always been in the back of my mind.

[Opteron]

I hope this gets him some serious honors. The competition has been keen, but the real goal has always been in the back of my mind.

I couldn't agree more, I think he's done a fine job and I hope he's rewarded well for his efforts...

[moderna]

How many of you had to defend a thesis as part of your bachelor's degree? No wonder the research dollars are flooding to China.

[gatekeeper53]

LOL and the kid is an undergrad!

[jmblazek]

Does anyone know how long it took the original record holder to hit 20 billion figures of Pi?
I presume you mean 2,000,000,000,000,000th bit of Pi? I think that is two quadrillion...not for sure though...I get mixed up with all those zeros. It's like looking at the US National Debt! :( URGH! BTW, it's $8,836,852,277,711.67 as of a few seconds ago...however, I'm sure it's gone up another $200,000 since I started typing! :) http://www.treasurydirect.gov/NP/BPDLogin?application=np

As for Pi bits...this may be outdated material...I haven't been able to find anything else since then.

Let's see how many HARD CORE oldtimers there are...does PiHex ring a bell???

I crunched for it back in 1998-2000. Along with GIMPS and distributed.net, PiHex was one of the first "mass" automated distributed computing projects on the Internet...before SETI@home made it popular. (FYI...the first Internet-based distributed computing project was started in 1988 by the DEC System Research Center and it utilized email to send and recieve tasks.)

PiHex was created by boy wonder, Colin Percival. Pi Segment will break his world record of the quadrillionth bit (1,000,000,000,000,000) calculated on Sept. 11, 2000. (BTW, the quadrillionth bit is 0.)

PiHex started on March 21, 1998, to find the five trillionth bit of Pi (which is 0) and then continued on April 19, 1998, to find the forty trillionth bit of Pi (which is 0). It started on the quadrillionth bit on September 5, 1998.

OK, taking bets now...what's the two quadrillionth bit of PI? 0 or 1

To answer the original question, it took just over two years to calculate the quadrillionth bit of Pi. Details here: http://oldweb.cecm.sfu.ca/projects/pihex/announce1q.html

BTW, Colin Percival went on to Oxford and is now a research student. Some other interesting things about him, he discovered the Hyper-Threading security flaw in the Pentium 4 and Xeon processors. He's a major contributor to FreeBSD. More of his work can be found here: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/
http://www.daemonology.net/

[Evil-Dragon]

My apologies, i misread a few digits somewhere and i wrote that post quite late last night. :icon_redface:

[fwjmath]

I'm here just to deliver a piece of news:
http://www.pisegment.net
2007.04.28 A Fix to the Download Problem
After the recent maintenance, some users have complaint to us that their machines were unable to download workunits. Here's a fix to it: you can simply restart the client to have this download problem fixed. This problem will be investigated. We apologize for the inconvenience.