Mathematicians Calculate 10 Trillion Digits of Pi With Xeons

Mmm...3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201

For the first time mathematicians were able to calculate the Pi constant with 10 trillion decimal digits.

Ten trillion would represent a 1 with 13 zeros. If you were to print that number on paper, you would need about 2.87 billion sheets, based on a standard configuration of about 3500 digits per sheet. Such a stack of paper would reach a height of 21.4 miles.

According to an unofficial announcement the calculation of the 10 trillion digits, it took 371 days and an additional 45 hours to verify on a system equipped with two Intel Xeon X5680 processors, 96 GB of memory and 24 2 TB hard drives. Only the first 5 trillion are offered for download as decimals via five separate downloads totaling 1.91 TB at this time.

The record of 10 trillion records doubles the previous record of 5 trillion digits, which was posted in August of this year.

http://www.tomshardware.com/

EVGA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win: The Raw Power Of Two GPUs

EVGA's GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win

Back at CES 2011 EVGA showed off an interesting concept card featuring 2 GF104 GPUs on a single board. NVIDIA has long designed multi-GPU cards using their high-end GPUs to carve out a market segment above their top single-GPU cards, but while NVIDIA promotes SLI across almost the entire GeForce spectrum it’s promoted as a multi-card option for anything other than those halo cards. Over the years a handful of AMD and NVIDIA’s board partners have struck out on their own and designed their own multi-GPU boards, and at CES 2011 EVGA joined that club.

The resulting product was the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 2Win, which combined 2 overclocked GTX 460s onto a single board. Unfortunately for EVGA, NVIDIA launched the GTX 560 Ti and its associated GF114 GPU mere weeks after CES 2011. GF104 was (and still is) a very capable GPU, but at the end of the day GF114 allowed the GTX 560 Ti to offer a 30% performance improvement for only a very slight increase in power consumption. The GTX 460 2Win did well enough for EVGA to continue with the design, but like the GTX 460 itself, it was clear that the 2Win design was never going to reach its full potential with GF104.

So now in November of 2011 EVGA is back with their next 2Win card: the EVGA GeForce GTX 560 Ti 2Win. Having replaced the GF104 GPUs with GF114 and tweaked the board to handle the extra power consumption, EVGA is giving it another shot. And this time they’re gunning for NVIDIA’s flagship single-GPU card, the GTX 580. Their proposition? For only a little more than the GTX 580 they can offer 30% better performance.

	EVGA GTX 560 Ti 2Win	GTX 580	GTX 570	GTX 560 Ti
Stream Processors	2 x 384	512	480	384
Texture Address / Filtering	2 x 64/64	64/64	60/60	64/64
ROPs	2 x 32	48	40	32
Core Clock	850MHz	772MHz	732MHz	822MHz
Shader Clock	1700MHz	1544MHz	1464MHz	1644MHz
Memory Clock	1002MHz (4008MHz data rate) GDDR5	1002MHz (4008MHz data rate) GDDR5	950MHz (3800MHz data rate) GDDR5	1002Mhz (4008MHz data rate) GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	2 x 256-bit	384-bit	320-bit	256-bit
VRAM	2 x 1GB	1.5GB	1.25GB	1GB
FP64	1/12 FP32	1/8 FP32	1/8 FP32	1/12 FP32
Transistor Count	2 x 1.95B	3B	3B	1.95B
Manufacturing Process	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm	TSMC 40nm
Price Point	$519	$489	$329	$229