In Google’s case, however, there is a less practical benefit: showing off the company’s tech - and using amenable hacks to promote it.
It’s a true testament to how Google Cloud’s infrastructure can help push the boundaries of scientific experimentation. The agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said its highest accuracy calculation - which is used for interplanetary navigation - is 3.141592653589793.Ĭongratulations, on your record-breaking calculations of pi to 100 trillion digits. Yet these myriad uses rarely require approximating pi to 10 decimal places - let alone 100 trillion.Įven NASA needs no more than 15. “Knowing pi to some approximation is incredibly important because it appears everywhere, from the general relativity of Einstein to corrections in your GPS to all sorts of engineering problems involving electronics,” Jan de Gier, a professor of mathematics and statistics at the University of Melbourne, told the Guardian last year. The number is used in countless formulas for real-world applications, from building the Great Pyramid of Giza to operating Martian robots, The feat clearly required immense time and resources - which begs the question, what was the point? Calculating pi is compute-, storage-, and network-intensive. In total, the process used a whopping 515 TB of storage and 82 PB of I/O. They then verified the final numbers with the Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula.
Their calculation ran for 157 days before finding the 100-trillionth decimal place - a 0. Iwao’s team used the y-cruncher program and Chudnovsky algorithm. Landmarks set in recent years have rarely lasted long. That landmark was then overturned the next year, before Iwao reclaimed her crown this March. Advances in computing are now causing records to regularly tumble.Ī 2019 milestone that was also set by Iwao was surpassed within months.