Calculation record of 100 trillion digits of Pi

Using a cloud computing service, programmer relations expert Emma Haruka Iwao calculated 100 trillion digits of Pi, according to a June 8 announcement by Google.

Pi has no exact value.

Currently, Google is working with Guinness World Records to officially confirm the results of Iwao's calculations. This is the second time Iwao has set the record. She previously worked out 31.4 trillion digits of Pi in 2019. Iwao shares Pi as her passion since childhood. The number pi (symbol π) is a mathematical constant whose value is equal to the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Since Pi does not have an exact value, calculating a longer Pi has long been a challenge for amateur and professional mathematicians and computer scientists.

Iwao shares the new record as a result of the growing capabilities of Google's Compute Engine service, including faster processors, faster data storage, and the ability to synchronize hardware to perform computations. .

Google does not disclose calculation costs. The computation took 157 days, required 128 virtual processors and used 864 gigabytes of memory. In total, the program requires 82,000 terabytes of data, the equivalent of 2,598 years of HD movie storage. Iwao performed the calculation using a free program called y-cruncher and worked with the program's creator, Alexander J. Yee, to confirm the results were correct. In addition, Iwao uses an algorithm that can generate the digits of Pi without knowing all the previous digits. She also compared the first digits with the results of many other people's calculations.

Iwao hopes the project will get people interested in the possibilities of cloud computing for scientific computing. Because technology is constantly improving, she does not rule out the possibility of finding a longer number in the future.