Google Broke Pi World Record, Requests 31.4-Trillion Works Of Art
Google Cloud is the world champion for Pi calculation, announced today, Pi Day, aka March 14th, or 3.14 2019. This is the first time the Pi calculation world record was ever broken in the cloud, and it breaks the most recent world record breakage, that of Peter Trueb in November of 2016. This calculation calculated Pi (π) to 31.4 trillion decimal places – that's 31,415,926,535,897 decimal places, beating the previous record by a significant margin.
The previous world record, calculated in November 2016 by Peter Trueb, calculated Pi to around 9-trillion decimal places fewer than the number calculated this year by Google. The Google Compute Engine took the task this year, bringing calculations to a virtual machine cluster for the first time in Pi calculation history.
This calculation was made thanks to the Pi-benchmark program developed by Alexander J. Yee, called y-cruncher. Once the number was calculated, Yee independently verified the calculation with Bellard's formula and BBP forumula. Google released information about the compute adventure as follows.
The date this program started computing was September 22nd, 2018, and the end date was January 21st, 2019, making this a computation time of 111.8 days (2,795 node-days), and a total start-to-end time of 121.1 days. This program used Chudnovsky's Formula and a total disk I/O of 9.02 PB read, 7.95 PB written.
Compute instance on this project was 96 vCPUs with 1.4 TB RAM (n1-megamem-96 instance). Disk instances: 24 nodes of n1-standard-16 (16 vCPUs, 60 GB memory), 10TB SSD persistent disk attached to each node, 240 TB in total, 170TB used maximum.
If you'd like to participate in the Pi Day fun, there's a Google Cloud Showcase Pi Day art-maker up for the tapping right this minute. You can be one of the 31.4-TRILLION pieces of artwork made for Pi Day on Google's behalf!
The last time we spoke about a Pi calculation record here on SlashGear, we were talking about how NVIDIA-powered computers broke the record back in 2013. The record continues to be broken faster and faster – technology's moving faster than the numbers can be calculated!