Google Team Calculates Pi to 100 Trillion Digits
Google has announced that a team of its developers has calculated the mathematical constant Pi to 100 trillion digits. Pi is used to test the performance of supercomputers, and as an irrational number, it has an infinite number of non-repeating decimal places. Mathematicians have been trying to calculate Pi since ancient times, and the previous record was held by scientists at the University of Applied Sciences Graubünden, who calculated Pi to 62.8 trillion digits. In 2019, a team led by Google developer Emma Haruka Iwao calculated Pi to 31.4 trillion digits. Now, Google has revealed that Iwao’s team has calculated Pi to 100 trillion digits using the Chudnovsky algorithm and Y-Cruncher software.
Iwao explained that she used the same tools and techniques as in 2019, but was able to achieve the new number even faster thanks to Google Cloud’s improved infrastructure in compute, storage, and networking. The Pi calculation took 157 days to complete, compared to 121 days for the 31.4 trillion digit calculation in 2019. The team processed 82,000 terabytes of data, compared to 19,000 terabytes in 2019. Iwao noted that it would take 3,170,979 years to read out the 100 trillion digits of Pi at a rate of one digit per second.
The calculation of Pi to such a high number of digits may seem like a purely academic exercise, but it has practical applications in fields such as cryptography and computer graphics. It also serves as a benchmark for testing the performance of supercomputers, which are used for complex simulations and data analysis. Google’s achievement demonstrates the power of cloud computing and the potential for continued advances in computing technology.
