Google boasts of its power in the cloud, calculating 100 trillion decimal places of pi and setting records.

Mario Seijas

Okay, Google, no need to brag either. Seems like a tech titan he just had to start counting to be able to make history, which he did. Google recently broke the world record for the most digits of pi computed in one sitting. The figure was about 100 trillion decimal places, which he saved and calculated using a real supercomputer. We’re talking about our own billions (millions of millions) of non-Americans, because from their point of view it would be about “trillions”.

Google surprised the world by far exceeding 60 million, which was a record high in 2021.

Google explained the process in a blog post where it breaks all necessary hardware and software accomplish this feat. It was a process that took time and in which Google was involved for several years, between the improvement of cloud features and the start of computing. The equipment they used and the time of the “experiment” were as follows:

• Program: y-cruncher v0.7.8, Alexander J. Yee
• Algorithm: Chudnovsky’s algorithm
• Node: n2-highmem-128 with 128V CPU
• RAM: 864 GB
• Total time: 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7651 seconds.
• Hard drive capacity: 663 TB available, of which 515 TB is used

Needless to say, the computer with which they were able to achieve this is not something we can have at home. But more than boasting about their hardware, Google wants to show through this experiment that they are the strength in cloud computing, since the whole process was carried out in Google Cloud. Calculating pi numbers is not something you might be surprised to have today quantum technologybut just looking at your computer’s RAM and disk space goes without saying that it’s a difficult task.

During the data collection process, several curiosities were discovered. One of them was that the only time they were repeated first 14 digits of pi (the most revealing) was at position 43 420 162 171 515. There were several matches with the first 13, but these 14 were repeated only once in the entire experiment. As a curiosity, these are the last numbers of the experiment:

4658718895 1242883556 4671544483 9873493812 1206904813 2656719174 5255431487 2142102057 7077336434 3095295560

Google has been devoting a lot of resources to improving its cloud service for several years now. Not only with apps like Google Drive or the office suite (Docs, Sheets…), but the company believes that this is where we should have the data. That’s why he continues to fight and make efforts to create a safe place where every user can easy access to all your documents regardless of the computer you are logging in from.