> Yeah, the recent pi calculation amassed 31.4 trillion decimal digits (or about 10^15 binary digits) of the computation load
But that was to be cool, not for any practical problem.
They needed 156 TiB of storage to hold that singular number, and that happened to be all-solid state storage ( because the majority of the time was spent on I/O, believe it or not!! )
That is to say: a faster CPU wouldn't really make the computation much faster. You need faster storage when you're dealing with numbers that big.
Double-precision floats are what people need most of the time. Crypto-guys need 2048+ or 4096+ byte numbers or something around those sizes for cryptography purposes. I'm not sure if large numbers are really used anywhere else.
If you do agree that mathematical problems can be considered practical, many prime-hunting computations do intend to resolve conjectures (Seventeen or Bust [1] was a good example), thus solving practical problems. I of course think that that pi calculation is nothing more than GCP advertisement ;-)
But that was to be cool, not for any practical problem.
They needed 156 TiB of storage to hold that singular number, and that happened to be all-solid state storage ( because the majority of the time was spent on I/O, believe it or not!! )
That is to say: a faster CPU wouldn't really make the computation much faster. You need faster storage when you're dealing with numbers that big.
Double-precision floats are what people need most of the time. Crypto-guys need 2048+ or 4096+ byte numbers or something around those sizes for cryptography purposes. I'm not sure if large numbers are really used anywhere else.