On August 3, two people and a super computer broke the world record for large computation of Pi. They reached 5 trillion digits.
Alexander Yee and Shigeru Kondo set out to break the worlds record for the largest amount of digits computed for Pi. The computer holding “roughly 22 TB [terabytes] of disk was needed to perform the computation,” According to their estimation. “Another 3.8 TB of disk [space] was needed to store the compressed output of the decimal and hexadecimal digits.
From May 4, 2020 until August 3, 2010 (90 days) the computer ran the computation. They verified the set of numbers two separate times over a total of 130 hours.
The final result computed Pi to five trillion digits, with the final set of numbers as “9484283852.” The final number being 2 of course.
Why did they do it?
“Because it’s Pi… and because we can!” said Yee. “After Fabrice Bellard’s announcement of 2.7 trillion digits on a “relatively cheap” desktop, it was pretty clear that the limit of personal computing was a lot higher.”
Computer Specs in Computation
3 x 2 TB SATA II (Store Pi Output) – Seagate (ST32000542AS)
16 x 2 TB SATA II (Computation) – Seagate (ST32000641AS)
