A Google employee has broken the world record for calculating Pi to the highest number of digits – at 31 trillion.
The announcement was made on Pi day which falls on March 14th, or 3.14, the US format of the date and the first three digits of the mathematical constant.
Emma Haruka Iwao, a developer for the search firm, used an application called y-cruncher on 25 different virtual cloud computers to generate the number.
The Japanese research said the calculation took about 121 days to complete – with zero breaks, otherwise the process would have been disrupted.
In mathematics pi, represented as the symbol ‘π’, is the ratio of a circle’s radius to its circumference and has far more digits than 3,14, which continue infinitely.
The contstant is used in engineering, physics, supercomputing and space exploration – because its value can be used in calculations for waves and circles.
Supercomputers are often tasked with calculating the number to more digits, with the previous record set in November 2016 by Peter Trueb, at 22 trillion digits.
Ms Iwao used Google Cloud’s Compute Engine to calculate pi to 31,415,926,535,897 decimal places.
According to the firm’s estimates, it would take 332,064 years to say the 31.4 trillion digit number.
Coming up with the figure used about 170 terabytes of data, roughly the same amount of browsable data on the whole of the internet in 2014.
Ms Iwao said she had been fascinated by the number since she had been a child.
‘Pi seems simple – it starts with 3.14. When I was a kid, I downloaded a program to calculate pi on my computer,’ Emma said.
‘When I was a kid, I didn’t have access to supercomputers But even if you don’t work for Google, you can apply for various scholarships and programs to access computing resources.
‘I was very fortunate that there were Japanese world record holders that I could relate to myself.
‘I’m really happy to be one of the few women in computer science holding the record, and I hope I can show more people who want to work in the industry what’s possible.’
WHAT IS CHINA’S ‘SUPER SUPER COMPUTER’ COMPETING WITH THE US?
On Friday, the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee unveiled the ‘Summit’ supercomputer that can deliver a peak performance of 200 petaflops, or about 200 quadrillion calculations per second.
It managed to beat out the previous record holder that was China’s Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer.
Summit is 60% faster than the TaihuLight supercomputer, which could achieve a peak performance of 93 petaflops.
Previously, China was home to the world’s two fastest supercomputers.
China held that record for five years.
Last year, China, had 202 machines on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Meanwhile, the US only had 143.
Source: Dailymail
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