It took Google 5 months to calculate Pi with the most decimal places in the world

The tech giant detailed the feat, revealing that the job took 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7651 seconds. That is almost half a year of continuous calculations. But do you know what pi is?

Alexander J. Yee’s program called “y-cruncher” did the hard work, running on a machine called n2-highmem-128, running Debian Linux and using 128 vCPUs, 864 GB of RAM, and access to 100 Gb/s output bandwidth.

Google created the NAS cluster because n2-highmem-128 has a maximum of 257TB of attached storage per VM, and the job required at least 554TB of temporary storage.

32 storage nodes using an n2-highCPU-16 instance and one compute node were clustered with 64 iSCSI block storage targets. The H2 instances run on Intel Ice Lake and Cascade Lake processors, but Google didn’t say which one was used for this job.

Google admitted that it did this to showcase its cloud and how fast it has gotten since its last launch. broke the record for calculating pi when it reached 31.4 trillion digits in 2019. A 2019 post explaining the effort states that it took 111.8 days of computation to complete.

Pi 2022 calculation was clearly faster, although the teams used in 2019 and 2021 were very different, making it hard to compare apples to apples. The previous record is dated 2021.

According to The Register, instances of n2-highmem-128 cost $7.706976 an hour list price. so the cost of the compute server was about $29,000.

n2-highCPU-16 instances cost $0.57 per hour, or about $70,000 for the entire job. Moving data would add a lot to the task.

And all in order to calculate a trillion digits of Pi.

Unfortunately, the Google post does not indicate if all these numbers contained some interesting pattern that could hint at the nature of the cosmos, or if any verses or passages from Shakespeare appeared.

Pi, so fundamental to modern science, remains a mystery that we can never know with infinite precision.