Google employee calculates pi to record 31 trillion digits
A Google employee from Japan has set a new world record for the number of digits of pi calculated. Emma Haruka Iwao, who works as a cloud developer advocate at Google, calculated pi to 31,415,926,535,897 digits, smashing the previous record of 22,459,157,718,361 digits set back in 2016.
Although Iwao was using the same y-cruncher program to calculate pi as the previous record holder, her advantage lay in the use of Google’s cloud-based compute engine. The 31 trillion digits of pi took 25 virtual machines 121 days to calculate. In contrast, the previous record holder, Peter Trueb, used just a single fast computer, albeit one equipped with two dozen 6TB hard drives to handle the huge dataset that was produced. His calculation only took...