Super PI is a

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer progra ...

that calculates pi to a specified number of digits after the decimal point—up to a maximum of 32 million. It uses Gauss–Legendre algorithm and is a

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

port of the program used by

Yasumasa Kanada was a Japanese computer scientist most known for his numerous world records over the past three decades for calculating digits of . He set the record 11 of the past 21 times. Kanada was a professor in the Department of Information Science at ...

in 1995 to compute pi to 2³² digits.

Significance

Super PI is popular in the

overclocking In computing, overclocking is the practice of increasing the clock rate of a computer to exceed that certified by the manufacturer. Commonly, operating voltage is also increased to maintain a component's operational stability at accelerated spe ...

community, both as a

benchmark Benchmark may refer to: Business and economics * Benchmarking, evaluating performance within organizations * Benchmark price * Benchmark (crude oil), oil-specific practices Science and technology * Benchmark (surveying), a point of known elevati ...

to test the performance of these systems and as a stress test to check that they are still functioning correctly.

Credibility concerns

The competitive nature of achieving the best Super PI calculation times led to fraudulent Super PI results, reporting calculation times faster than normal. Attempts to counter the fraudulent results resulted in a modified version of Super PI, with a

checksum A checksum is a small-sized block of data derived from another block of digital data for the purpose of detecting errors that may have been introduced during its transmission or storage. By themselves, checksums are often used to verify dat ...

to validate the results. However, other methods exist of producing inaccurate or fake time results, raising questions about the program's future as an overclocking benchmark. Super PI utilizes

x87 x87 is a floating-point-related subset of the x86 architecture instruction set. It originated as an extension of the 8086 instruction set in the form of optional floating-point coprocessors that worked in tandem with corresponding x86 CPUs. These ...

floating point instructions which are supported on all x86 and

x86-64 x86-64 (also known as x64, x86_64, AMD64, and Intel 64) is a 64-bit version of the x86 instruction set, first released in 1999. It introduced two new modes of operation, 64-bit mode and compatibility mode, along with a new 4-level paging ...

processors, current versions which also support the lower precision

Streaming SIMD Extensions In computing, Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE) is a single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) instruction set extension to the x86 architecture, designed by Intel and introduced in 1999 in their Pentium III series of Central processing units (CPUs ...

vector instructions.

The future

Super PI is single threaded, so its relevance as a measure of performance in the current era of

multi-core A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such ...

processors is diminishing quickly. Therefore, wPrime has been developed to support multiple threaded calculations to be run at the same time so one can test stability on multi-core machines. Other multithreaded programs include
Hyper PI
IntelBurnTest,

Prime95 Prime95, also distributed as the command-line utility mprime for FreeBSD and Linux, is a freeware application written by George Woltman. It is the official client of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), a volunteer computing project ...

, Montecarlo superPI, OCCT or

y-cruncher The Chudnovsky algorithm is a fast method for calculating the digits of , based on Ramanujan’s formulae. It was published by the Chudnovsky brothers in 1988. It was used in the world record calculations of 2.7 trillion digits of in December ...

. Last but not least, while SuperPi is unable to calculate more than 32 million digits, and Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo were able to set a record of 10 Trillion 50 Digits of Pi using y-cruncher under a 2 x Intel Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 GHz - (12 physical cores, 24 hyperthreaded) computer on October 16, 2011 Super PI is much slower than these other programs, and utilizes inferior algorithms to them.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Super PI Benchmarks (computing) Pi-related software