It’s a bottleneck. If you are calculating faster than you can record the results, you have to wait for the write operation to complete before you can do the next calculation.
But what does calculating pi have to do with the disk speed?
Applesause@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
m532@lemmygrad.ml 2 weeks ago
They don’t have 100TB of ram to store all the digits, I guess
HK65@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I imagine it’s about checkpointing the calculation as it’s very long.
Point is, if the system crashes, you want to be able to resume the calculation without losing too much progress, so you want to periodically write progress to disk.
That takes some CPU cycles away from the calculation, and if your disk driver is inefficient, it will take away more.
vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
AHH ok yeah that does make some sense.
HK65@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
The question did too, it isn’t immediately apparent why you’d write to disk to calculate pi if you haven’t worked in a place that churned a lot of numbers before.