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Pi Segment is a distributed computing project which is held by individuals. It aims to propagandize distributed computing, encourage people to make full use of their computing power and challenge the world record of calculating Pi.

As it calculate Pi by dividing the task into small segments for participants all over the world to crunch, it is given the name Pi Segment.

Though Pi Segment uses ordinary computers to do the calculation, it won't affect the smooth running of your computer as it uses only the spare resources of your computer.

Spare resources here mean CPU resources which haven't been put into use. It is produced by the current computing of your machine not reaching the computational power of your CPU. As nowadays CPUs compute faster and faster and can process more and more things, it also leaves them unused in most of the time. So the computational resources are wasted.

Maybe you would think: will it ever be idle as I'm using it all the time? The answer is "of course". As seeing is believing, you can check this by yourself. Run the Task Manager and click the Process tab. You would find an image named "System Idle Process". Please pay attention to its CPU time, as in this graph (click to zoom out).

The Task Manager shows informations about current processes. "System Idle Process" is a special process which runs whenever the system is idle. In Windows, every process use the CPU in turn to meet its own need, and the "CPU time" of a process is the CPU time this process has used since its start. So the CPU time of "System Idle Process" represents the idle time of your PC since its start. You will find it very long, almost reach the time your PC has been on. In other words, most of your CPU time, which also means computational power, is wasted. What Pi Segment uses to calculate Pi is exactly this part of computational power.

Maybe you will think that when the CPU is idle, the computer won't consume much energy. But the fact is just not that, although PCs nowadays have a standard of energy saving and CPUs nowadays support energy-saving mode. If you will stop using your computer for a long time, we suggest that you can turn it off as in idle, your computer still consume energy but can do nothing. But when you are using your computer to do things such as writing, enjoying music or films and surfing online, a great deal of computational resources are wasted as the tasks above are just a piece of cake for modern CPUs. And at the same moment, you have to turn on the monitor, which consumes a rather large share of energy used by your computer.

Sure, you may doubt about whether it is proper to make your machine full-loaded only to calculate Pi. That's really a controversial question. As a matter of fact, we don't need such accurate with Pi even when calculating the perimeter of our solar system to the precision of atoms. But in a sight of science, every research is nonsense when it is raised and that's why it is called a research. Also, you can join in other distributed computing projects, for example some project purposing to find drugs for cancer, if you think that is more meaningful.

The reasons why we chose to calculate Pi are:

1. Our ability is limited and we can't do computation which needs high costs. In fact, almost 100% of this project is developed by a university student. We have almost no financial support and this project is a non-profit one.

2. Calculating Pi is used widely for benchmark. There's a custom that people love to benchmark a computer by calculating Pi because the computation can be repeated as Pi is a certain irrational number.

3. It won't be controversial. Maybe it can attract more eyeballs to do a simulation of the explosion of atom bombs, but the result may harm the peace. But calculating Pi won't meet such a problem as it is a pure mathematical problem and its result would be published.

4. It is suitable for distributed computing. Though distributed computing is for the whole world, there is still no distributed computing projects in China for the public. We hope to change this situation by Pi Segment. So this project have to be reliable. As the formula for Pi Segment is very clear, it's very suitable for distributed computing.

5. We want to break the world record of the calculation of Pi. The BBP formula allows us to calculate only a certain bit of Pi. But record-breaking is just a hope. If few participants join us, we won't be fast enough to achieve our goal.

You may also doubt about whether running your PC with full load will do harm to it and shorten its life. The answer is: the life time of your computer depends mostly on its quality. The participation of distributed computing has no bad affect on your PC. If your PC can run 3D-games smoothly, then undoubtably Pi Segment would be all OK on your PC, as 3D-games needs all parts of your PC to run in their full speed, but Pi Segment needs only a little memory and disk space, and the frequency of accessing is low. Pi Segment uses mainly your CPU.

You may have other questions, but it is worth a shot. Give it a try!