New Record From Google - 100 Trillion Digits Of Pi
Written by Sue Gee   
Friday, 17 June 2022

Emma Haruka Iwao, a Developer Advocate at Google Cloud, started a calculation to compute pi to 100 Trillion digits on Google Cloud from her home office on October 14 2021.

The task took until March 21, 2022 and led to the discovery that the 100-trillionth decimal place of pi is 0. If the sequence leading up to the 0 was read out loud at the rate of 1 digit per second, the feat would require 3.17 million years.

The calculation required 82,000 terraabytes of data to be processed and its vital statistics are provided in this overview from the Google Cloud blog: 

  • Program: y-cruncher v0.7.8, by Alexander J. Yee
  • Algorithm: Chudnovsky algorithm
  • Compute node: n2-highmem-128 with 128 vCPUs and 864 GB RAM
  • Start time: Thu Oct 14 04:45:44 2021 UTC
  • End time: Mon Mar 21 04:16:52 2022 UTC
  • Total elapsed time: 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7.651 seconds
  • Total storage size: 663 TB available, 515 TB used
  • Total I/O: 43.5 PB read, 38.5 PB written, 82 PB total

The y-cruncher algorithm, which originated in "a high-school project that went a little too far" and is described as:

the  first scalable multi-threaded Pi-benchmark for multi-core systems

dates from 2009 and has been breaking records ever since. Back in August 2010 we reported on the algorithm's first breakthough when Alexander J. Yee & Shigeru Kondo computed pi to 5 trillion digits. What we found remarkable then was that this had been achieved using nothing but a desktop computer. It was a fairly upmarket machine for the time with 12 physical cores and 24 hyperthreads, 96GBytes of Ram and 40TByes of disk storage. The following year Shigeru Kondo doubled the number of digits, to 10 trillion and this latest record, which is in the process of being evaluated as a Guinness World Record, takes us to the next order of magnitude. 

This list of Pi milestones comes from the y-cruncher website:

pirecords

Emma Haruka Iwoa initially used y-cruncher when she first broke the digits of pi world record in 2019 with 31.4 trillion digits, see Google Smashes Pi Record For Pi Day 2019. This infographic shows how the number of digits and data processed  increased while the calculation time shrank between the two occasions. 

pi records

Referring to her latest success, Iwoa noted:

I used the same tools and techniques as I did in 2019, but I was able to hit the new number more quickly thanks to Google Cloud’s infrastructure improvements in compute, storage and networking. 

She also hints that she's likely to re-try:

Back when I hit that record in 2019 — and again now — many people asked "what's next?" And I’m happy to say that the scientific community just keeps counting. There's no end to π, it’s a transcendental number, meaning it can't be written as a finite polynomial. Plus, we don't see an end to the evolution of computing.  We could still see another fundamental shift that keeps the momentum going. So ...  I’ll just keep counting.

100trillionpisqpic

More Information

A bigger piece of the pi: Finding the 100-trillionth digit

Related Articles

5 Trillion Digits of Pi - New World Record

Google Smashes Pi Record For Pi Day 2019

Pi Day 2022 - It's Irrational!!! 

Non-Computable & Other Numbers

60 trillionth binary digit of pi-squared calculated

Yahoo! Gets to the 2 Quadrillionth bit of Pi - it's zero

Reaching The Unreachable - Pi Squared And Catalan's Constant  

To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.

 

Banner


PlanetScale Gets Into Vector Search
02/12/2024

PlanetScale, the cloud MySQL-compatible database with advanced scaling capabilities, is now upgraded with vector storage and search.



The Feds Want Us To Move On From C/C++
13/11/2024

The clamour for safe programming languages seems to be growing and becoming official. We have known for a while that C and C++ are dangerous languages so why has it become such an issue now and is it  [ ... ]


More News

 

Last Updated ( Friday, 17 June 2022 )