Google Cloud developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao and her colleagues once again claim to have calculated Pi to a new record number of digits. Iwao says that the team has calculated the mathematical constant to 100 trillion digital decimal places.
Iwao and her team previously set the record in 2019 when they carried out a calculation to an accuracy of 31.4 trillion digits. The benchmark has been broken a few times since then, including when researchers from a Swiss university calculated Pi to 82.8 trillion digits last year — twice as many as the Google team attained a few years back. Iwao and her team are working with Guinness World Records for official validation of their achievement as a world record.
In a blog post, Iwao wrote that finding as many digits of Pi as possible is a way to measure the progress of compute power. Her job involves showing off what Google Cloud is capable of, so it's not too surprising that Iwao tapped into the power of the platform to perform the calculation.
In 2019, the calculation (which figured out a third as many digits as the most recent attempt) took 121 days. This time around, the calculation ran for 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7.651 seconds, meaning the computers were running more than twice as quickly despite Iwao using "the same tools and techniques." Around 82,000 terabytes of data were processed overall.
Iwao also notes that reading all 100 trillion digits out loud at a rate of one per second would take more than 3.1 million years. And in case you're wondering, the 100-trillionth decimal place of Pi is 0.