Yes, Pi day is kind of like May the 4th. It’s a date that only us geeks and nerds take notice of. For today’s Pi day Google developer, Emma Haruka Iwao, has set a Guinness World Record for the most accurate value of Pi.
Using a y-cruncher computer program on Google Cloud over the last four months Emma was about to calculate Pi to 31.4 trillion (31,415,926,535,897 digits to be exact) digits. I would list it here but I suspect that many digits may break the website.
Google have said that it is not just a significant milestone for their “Google Cloud infrastructure but for mathematical computing overall”. This is the first time the cloud has been used to calculate Pi to this magnitude.
Overall Emma used 25 Google Cloud virtual machines over 121 days to calculate Pi to this many digits. The entire time the Google Cloud infrastructure kept all those machines in operation without any failures which is just as well as the calculation would have failed if there were any disruptions. As you would expect that amount of digits requires a lot of storage — she calculates she required 170 terabytes to finish the calculation.
Emma and Google have shown that Google Cloud computing can be used to solve many complex mathematical problems and this is only the beginning of what is possible. Another part of the Cloud is the sharing and Google have published the computed disks in their entirety as disk sets- if you want to have a look yourself and check it’s correct you can grab them here.
For more information on how Emma performed the task head on over to the Google Cloud Platform blog and check it out
