Background Pi
Many years ago (2003?), I (Deathbob) started working on Background Pi. I had been looking for something that would push the limits of my programming knowledge. Therefore, one day I was looking at some pages about pi for no reason at all. I fell in love with a digit extraction program. I was like, "I could so make a ton of computers do it at the same time! Well, someday."
So here we are and what a journey it has been. The original design required that PIB (Pi Block) files be manually moved and managed to calculate Pi. It was hard to keep track of and downright annoying. But hey, didn't know how to network at the time so it was the best I could do. That was with Visual C++ (We won't discuss the non-gui version here), it was decided that Visual C++ Sucked. So I began learning the Win32 API, which taught me plenty more. So after much research of threading, network communication, and user interfaces; Background Pi version 3 was released. The server ran on my windows desktop and still used PIB files. Well, let me tell you something about PIB files... Each PIB file holds 9 bytes of information (9 digits of pi), there were hundreds of these files. The total storage space needed for such a setup should have been a few thousand bytes or a few kilobytes or roughly a typical Word Document. The actual size because of being in separate files was several megabytes (about 1000 times what it should have been). This is due to the fact of "overhead" or wasted room, imagine taking an essay that is 2 pages long and printing it out. Not that much paper is used, but what if you put a single word on each page, your going to use A LOT of paper. Needless to say we quickly changed the way we stored the information.
We made a few minor updates to version 3 to fix some bugs but it was very difficult to get updates to people. So we started work on version 4, the main idea was to make the system more robust for future improvement and provide a way to automatically update the program. It was a success and made it easy to provide updates for bugs or new features, the ability to track your contributions was sent out in the form of an update. But it wasn't without faults, we acidentally pushed out the wrong version of a dll once that had a flaw in it corrupting information for a time, it was quickly found and corrected through another update.
Now our goal is to go cross-platform with Java and provide means of computing more than just Pi. We hope to provide a more user-friendly alternative to BOINC. I hope that we will recruit some projects from there. If you have an idea for a computing project or have an existing one you would like to see on here, post it on the forums!
So what are you waiting for? Hop on over to SourceForge and Download Background Pi and get computing!