March 14 (3/14) is also known as Pi Day, or the annual celebration of the mathematical constant π, which was first approximated by the Babylonians and Egyptians 4,000 years ago and later by Greek mathematicians. It also coincidentally falls on Albert Einstein’s birthday (1879) and the day astrophysicist Stephen Hawking died (2018). And this year, on the anniversary of all of this, for the first time, someone managed to calculate more than 31 trillion digits of pi – 31,415,926,535,897, to be exact, using cloud computing.
This is much larger than the approximately 500 digits known at the beginning of the 20th century and the 17.5 million digits that American mathematician and programmer Bill Gosper managed to calculate in 1985. And compared to the previous record – 22.4 trillion digits, achieved by Peter Trueb in 2016 – it is an increase of about 10 trillion digits!
Google Cloud advocate Emma Haruka Iwao accomplished the feat using Google Cloud’s Compute Engine, according to Google, which detailed her work in a blog post yesterday. Under the supervision of Daisuke Takahashi, an associate professor at the University of Tsukuba’s Center for Computational Sciences, Iwao and her colleagues used a multi-threaded version of pi benchmarking app y-cruncher to compute a 170 terabyte calculation across 25 Google Cloud virtual machines over a total of 121 days. Her effort was successful — the final result was correct — and she published the calculated digits in disk snapshots for anyone to copy.
“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,” Iwao said. “I was very lucky that there were Japanese world record holders that I could relate to. I’m very happy to be one of the few women in computer science to hold such a record, and I hope I can show more people who want to work in this industry that it’s possible.”.
