Multicore Javascript Pi Computing with WebWorkers

http://antimatter15.github.com/pi/partial.html

It’s not using the fastest algorithm, but the nice thing about this one is that it’s capable of digit-extraction (calculating one section without knowing the digits before it) and was nice for doing distributed computing. This also has the nice side effect of working pretty well with the MapReduce paradigm (To calculate a block, calculate primes 3 to 2*N, map it all to the magical pi algorithm and then add it all up and truncate the fractional part, however it doesn’t really use MapReduce because there aren’t enough machines/threads to make it really necessary to distribute out the reducing part). So on the time-memory tradeoff scale, this algorithm uses low memory and is slower, which makes it pretty good for the purposes of something implemented with WebWorkers as I can’t imagine it would be good to have the same data multiplied by the number of threads and having lots of data being passed with each postMessage.