Google Cloud believes it just set a new world record by calculating the mathematical constant pi to 100 trillion digits, beating the previous record of 62.8 trillion.
Pi denotes the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and is an irrational number, meaning it cannot be expressed exactly as a ratio of two integers and therefore its decimal representation never ends. Mathematicians have been increasing its accuracy for thousands of years, and Google just added another 37.2 trillion digits.
In order to calculate 100 trillion digits of pi, Google Cloud used a n2-highmem-128 machine running Debian Linux 11. The machine consists of an Intel Xeon with 128 vCPUs and 864GB of RAM. The total storage allotted to this behemoth was 663 terabytes, of which 515 terabytes were used. The y-cruncher program by Alexander J. Yee was then run to perform the calculation using the Chudnovsky formula.
The magnitude of the task is reflected in how long it took to complete. Google set the program running on Oct. 14, 2021 and it achieved 100 trillion digits on March 21, 2022. The total compute time was 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes, and 7.651 seconds. During that time, a total of 82 petabytes of data was read and written by the machine.
Google Cloud previously held the record in 2019 when it calculated 31.4 trillion digits. Since then, the bandwidth available on Google's cloud infrastructure has increased by 600%, which Google Developer Advocate Emma Haruka Iwao admitted, "was a big factor that made this 100-trillion experiment possible, allowing us to move 82.0 PB of data for the calculation, up from 19.1 PB in 2019."
The record has yet to be verified by Guinness World Records, but the final numbers have been verified using another algorithm called the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula, so it should just be a formality.