CSC352 Homework 1 2013
--D. Thiebaut (talk) 09:59, 11 September 2013 (EDT)
Computing Pi using the Monte Carlo Method: Is it worth multithreading?
A Monte-Carlo Calculation of Pi, by Michael Jay Schillaci, Ph.D. at Roberts Wesleyan College, is a good introduction to computing Pi using Monte-Carlo (See Section 1.3).
The whole idea is to throw darts at a square target in which lies a concentric circle whose diameter is the same as the side of the square. After throwing a huge number N of darts randomly, i.e. not aiming for the circle but aiming just for the square, the ratio of holes created by the darts inside the circle, which we'll call Nc, relative to N is approximately Pi/2. The larger N is, the closer to Pi the ratio becomes.
The goal for this assignment is to compute the speedup of a multithreaded java application where each thread computes its own version of Nc given N. The main program accumulates the different Nc values and the different N values from the threads and reports the resulting value of Pi, and the elapsed user time in ms.
