π, with a whole lot of decimals

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Software engineer Emma Haruka Iwao beat her own record from three years ago for the number of decimals calculated for pi. In 2019, she came up with its 31.4 trillionth number, and now, using the same y-cruncher program, she got to the 100 trillionth digit, which happens to be zero. The result came in March 2022, following the start of the process in October 2021 on Google Cloud computers. Compared to 121 days spent finding the “shorter” number in 2019, this round took 157 days, which is half the time due to improvements on Google’s platform. In the first record-breaking calculation, the computers processed around 19,000TB of data, but this time, to get to 100,000 trillion digits, the computer crunched a dizzying 82,000TB of data. If you want to download these 100 trillion numbers for yourself, or study the source code that was used, follow this link.

⇨ The Verge, Jasmine Hicks, “Google Cloud employee calculates pi to 100 trillion digits.”

2022-06-13