This project turns a Commodore 64 or VIC-20 and up to three 1541 disk drives into a tiny distributed computing cluster for calculating of π using the Monte Carlo method. Each 1541 contains its own 1 MHz CPU and 2 KB of RAM, making its computational power comparable to that of the host computer.

The host uploads code into the drive's memory and starts it remotely. The C64/VIC-20 and the drives then work in parallel. The project explores distributed and parallel computing using 1980s home computer hardware. It may be one of the smallest and slowest heterogeneous compute clusters around :=)

Implementations were tested both in emulators and on real hardware.

Note: Generative AI was used extensively as a coding assistant during this project. However, I designed the experiments, tested the code on both emulators and real hardware, and reviewed and understood the resulting code — I believe I can account for every line of it. Texts are written by me, though checked by Grammarly.