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Programs for Calculating
On Your Own Computer




The following programs are generally listed according to the speed at which they compute values of Pi. (The last one listed here being the fastest program!)
   Since I'm running Windows 95/DOS 7 on a PC, each program listed here is at least available in an x86 (PC) DOS (or Win32) binary form. Executables for a particular program on another platform may exist, since some of them come with their own open source code! (Consult the program homepages and links listed below.)

 


1) The easy to run Super_Pi  (for MS-Windows™) by Yasumasa Kanada

Download Super_Pi now (in a 72 kb .zip file) and Calculate up to 32 Million digits of Pi. There are twelve different digit-lengths to choose from (see below). Simply extract the files (Super_pi.exe, Super_pi.hlp   and Super_pi.txt) into any directory and run the program. The program creates the file pi_rec.txt to keep track of which sizes you've calculated, and the digits are placed into a file called "pi_data.txt" (CAUTION: Each time you calculate a different length of Pi, this file will be overwritten! So rename the file if you want to keep those digits.)

 

When the program starts, you'll see a window like this:

Click on 'Calculate' and choose one of the twelve sizes (K=1,024 bytes and M=1,048,576 bytes) in the next window. After clicking OK in that window, a 'confirmation' box will pop up
.


When you begin a calculation, a " Stop (S) " item will appear on the Menu so you can abort any runs you accidentally started or that are taking too long.

The following pic shows a full run to calculate just 32,768 digits ( the 32K choice) on a 100MHz PC. Time shown: 32 seconds; that's exactly 1024 digits/sec (not very fast). Calculating 512K, took 11m 06s, so the speed went down to only about 787 digits/sec; even worse! You could probably D/L large files of Pi from the Net faster than trying to calculate them on an old computer (less than 300 MHz CPU) with this program; especially if you download those files with over 50% .zip compression.



After reading Carey Bloodworth's comments about Windows 95/98 for calculating Pi, I found out why very few Pi programmers ever bother using the Windows OS (with API functions to draw windows, etc.): It usually causes serious losses in the performance (speed) of your program! Especially if you have an older CPU and not much memory!
On the other hand, most would agree that it's one of the simplest Pi programs for a user to run; so perhaps it should be called 'Easy_Pi' instead.



2) pi-AGM (Arithmetic Geometric Mean Program) by Carey Bloodworth

Check out Carey's Home Page and detailed math descriptions of subroutines that help you build a fast Pi program here:
http://www.bloodworth.org/.

 


3) pi_fft5  (pi_css5) by Takuya Ooura

 

 


4) PiFast33 by Xavier Gourdon

 

 


5) QPI-Quick Pi by Steve Pagliarulo


This page is still under construction... I plan on adding descriptions and displays of sample runs for each of these Pi programs and other unique ones as I discover them!


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