Could anyone jump in and provide some information on how calculating pi to a gazillion digits is worth the effort?
It is about pushing limits with a home computer. The processor itself was a 12 core Xeon processor, but all of the storage required - both RAM and disk is quite impressive. I am working on a similar brute-force analysis, but I have access to a datacenter with many machines. Not so impressive.
I never considered the details of Pi digit calculation, but I was surprised to see how it's very dependent on IO:
"For large computations, the bottleneck is either memory bandwidth or disk bandwidth depending on the number of hard drives and their configuration."