This is the second time Google Cloud has set a record for the number of digits of a mathematical constant.
In 2019, Google Cloud calculated the number Pi — an irrational number discovered thousands of years ago—to 31.4 trillion digits. It was a world record. But then, in 2021, scientists from the Graub?nden University of Applied Sciences added another 31.4 trillion to this figure, increasing the total to 62.8 trillion decimal places. Now Google Cloud has broken the latest record by calculating the number of pi to an unprecedented 100 trillion digits.
This is the second time that Google Cloud sets a record for the number of digits of a mathematical constant. And in just three years, the number of calculated digits of Pi has tripled.
“This achievement shows how much faster the Google Cloud infrastructure is getting from year to year,” Google Cloud said in a press release. “The main technology that has made this possible is Compute Engine, a secure and customizable Google Cloud computing service, as well as its several recent additions and improvements: the Compute Engine N2 family of machines, outgoing bandwidth of 100 Gbps, Google Virtual NIC and balanced persistent disks.”
The program that performed the calculation of 100 trillion digits of Pi is called y-cruncher v0.7.8, its author is Alexander J. Yi. Google used the Chudnovsky algorithm and the n2-highmem-128 computing node with 128 virtual CPUs and 864 GB of RAM.
The calculation itself began on Thursday, October 14, at 00:45 Eastern American time in 2021 and ended on Monday, March 21, at 00:16 Eastern American time in 2022. This is 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7,651 seconds.
The storage size of this number is 515 TB out of 663 TB available, with a total of 43.5 PB of I/O operations for reading, 38.5 PB for writing and 82 PB of memory in total.