Pi Calculation Record Broken

The University of Applied Sciences Graubünden drew attention with its new Pi calculation record.

Most of us know the Pi number as 3.1415, but it is actually much, much longer, and it has been known for years that researchers have been working to find the most accurate calculation. Researchers at the Swiss-based Graubünden University of Applied Sciences claim to have broken the world record for the mathematical constant and share that they calculate for the 62.8 trillion digits of Pi. Let’s also mention that the current record holder is Timothy Mullican, who calculated up to 50 trillion digits last year.

According to the Swiss university, it took 108 days and 9 hours to calculate the new value. That’s 3.5 times faster than Mullican’s efforts, and almost twice the record Google set in 2019. A few years ago, Emma Haruka Iwao and colleagues used the power of 25 Google Cloud virtual machines to calculate 31,415,926,355,897 Pi in 121 days.

According to The Register, Swiss researchers used two 32-core AMD Epyc 7542 processors with 1TB of RAM and a rig powered by a program called y-Cruncher. Its setup used 38 hard drives, each with 16TB of storage, 34 of which were used for computing and 4 for storing the new value of the Pi. The team did not use SSDs, although their speed made the process faster. This is because the large number of write cycles required for Pi computation will result in high wear and tear on SSDs that are not cheap. It is stated that SSDs will not work as the university wants to show that it is possible to perform extremely memory-intensive calculations with limited budgets and resources.

Guinness has yet to confirm the new record but once confirmed, the university plans to release the new and expanded value of the Pi.