Super Pi
From TPU Reference
darcmonlie
Super Pi is a program developed by D. Takahashi at the University of Tokyo.
It is designed to calculate a certain number of Pi decimals. In the last several years Super Pi has become a popular benchmark among overclockers and the hardware industry; because it is close to scientific real world application, yet does not rely solely on raw CPU performance.
Super Pi is single-threaded, which means it will not benefit from a multiprocessor system.
History
In August 1995, the current world record calculation of pi up to 4,294,960,000 decimal digits (Details are shown in the windows help) was attained by using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo. The program was written by D. Takahashi and his colleague Dr. Y. Kanada at the University of Tokyo computer center. This record-breaking program was ported to personal computer environment such as Windows NT and Windows 95 and called Super PI. In order to calculate 33.55 million digits, it takes about 3 days with a Pentium 90 MHz, 40 MB main memory and 340 MB available storage.
The unofficial versions 1.4 and 1.5 were created by XtremeSystems users.
- Version 1.4 includes a readout that has 0.001 second resolution - not accuracy! Also included is a checksum algorithm for results verification.
- Version 1.5 changes the application title to include to "XtremeSystems".
Tweaking
There are many software tweaks for Super Pi, some of them are just myths, but some may have an impact of several seconds.
- Booting Windows to diagnostic mode (Start -> msconfig)
- Running Super Pi with real-time priority
- Shutting down explorer.exe and userinit.exe
- Using Service Pack 2 with Win XP
- Defragmenting the hard drive
- Using ramdisk tools (?)
- Maxmem tweak = multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windo ws Server 2003" /fastdetect /maxmem=104
- Disabling page file
- Set Processor Scheduling to Programs and Memory Usage to System Cache
