Comment on Pi calculation world record shattered at 314 trillion digits with a four-month run on a single server — StorageReview retakes the crown, thanks to storage bandwidth

• vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  But what does calculating pi have to do with the disk speed?

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  • HK65@sopuli.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I imagine it’s about checkpointing the calculation as it’s very long.

    Point is, if the system crashes, you want to be able to resume the calculation without losing too much progress, so you want to periodically write progress to disk.

    That takes some CPU cycles away from the calculation, and if your disk driver is inefficient, it will take away more.

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    • vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      AHH ok yeah that does make some sense.

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  • Applesause@mander.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s a bottleneck. If you are calculating faster than you can record the results, you have to wait for the write operation to complete before you can do the next calculation.

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  • m532@lemmygrad.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    They don’t have 100TB of ram to store all the digits, I guess

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