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Google developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao said the result shows how far computers have come and helps to measure technological progress.
A team at Google Cloud claims to have broken a new record by calculating 100trn digits of pi (π), with the last calculated digit being zero.
Google developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao and her team broke the world record for calculating pi in 2019, with a calculation of 31.4trn digits.
Haruka Iwao said that finding as many digits of pi as possible is a project that scientists, mathematicians and engineers have been working on for thousands of years.
“Today, we use computers to do this calculation, which helps us learn how much faster they’ve become,” Haruka Iwao wrote in a blog post. “It’s one of the few ways to measure how much progress we’re making across centuries, including before the invention of electronic computers.”
Google Cloud said the achievement shows how much faster its infrastructure has become. The team made the calculation using the Compute Engine, which is Google Cloud’s compute service. Haruka Iwao said she used the same techniques in 2019, but was aided with improvements in compute, storage and networking.
“In 2019, it took the computers 121 days to get to 31.4trn digits,” she explained. “This time, it took them 157 days to get to 100trn – more than twice as fast as the first project.”
Haruka Iwao said around 82,000Tb of data was processed to get the new calculation, compared to 19,000Tb in 2019. She added that it would take more than 3.17m years to read all 100trn digits out loud.
Google Cloud said it is actively working with Guinness World Records to secure their official validation of this calculation as a new world record.
Haruka Iwao said there won’t be an end to new pi calculations anytime soon. “There’s no end to π, it’s a transcendental number, meaning it can’t be written as a finite polynomial.” she said. “Plus, we don’t see an end to the evolution of computing. So, like I said: I’ll just keep counting.”
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