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Why Only Calculate One Single Bit of Pi? Why Not All?
This depends on current mathematical formula and network development. If we calculate all bits of Pi, we'll encounter several problems below:
1. There would be a great dependence between workunits and they would have to wait a long for others to finish processing before they could be processed.
2. We would need a great deal of bandwidth to synchronize data.
3. All small calculation suspends of participating machines would make great delays on the whole project.
4. The calculation would need huge memory and hard disk space.
5. It would be better to leave this kind of work to huge computers.
Why We Calculate Pi?
This decision is based on the following points:
1. A pure mathematical project costs less.
2. The calculation of Pi, as a custom, is usually performed as a way of evaluating the computational power of a computer. And as Pi is a determinate number, the result of this calculation can be verified by repeating the calculation.
3. It is not controversy, and the result can be shared to the whole world and benefits all.
4. The calculation of Pi fits very well in the practise of distributed computing. We hope that we can test new techniques of distributed computing (like computing on graphic cards, 64bit CPUs, P2P, etc). And now this formula of Pi suits in these needs very much.
5. To break the world record of calculating a single bit of Pi. But pay attention, it's not comparable at all to those computation which produce as many as possible bits of Pi.
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