Number crunching algo for learning multithreading?

Question

I have never really implemented anything dealing with threads; my only experience with them is reading about them in my undergrad. So I want to change that by writing a program that does some number crunching, but splits it up into several threads.

My first ideas for this hopefully simple multithreaded program were:

• Beal's Conjecture brute force based on my SO question.
• Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula for calculating Pi.
• Prime number brute force search

As you can see I have an interest in math and thought it would be fun to incorporate it into this, rather than coding something such as a server which wouldn't be nearly as fun!

But the 3 ideas don't seem very appealing and I have already done some work on them in the past so I was curious if anyone had any ideas in the same spirit as these 3 that I could implement?

Answer 1

Many good but single threaded FFT implementations could benefit from multithreading and practically help a lot of real users. With so many languages there is always some of them in need to fill this gap.

Answer 2

For a start, cracking DES is a nice experiment. Google about it

Answer 3

The Quadratic Sieve is fairly straightforward, easy enough to parallelize, and builds off of what you have already worked on.

Answer 4

Render a Mandelbrot fractal. Use threads to allow multiple cores to calculate parts in parallel and allow responsive user zooming and panning while calculating.