Google has something big to celebrate for Pi Day this year: one of their teams has beaten the Guinness World Record for the most accurate value of pi. Emma Haruka Iwao and her colleagues used the power of cloud computing to calculate 31,415,926,535,897 digits of pi. That’s 9 billion digits more than the previous record and a complete novel longer than the 3.14 value that most of us know. To perform that task, Iwao had to run a pi-benchmark application called y-cruncher in 25 Google Cloud virtual machines for 121 days.
According to Google, the problem with computing for such a large number is that the time and resources needed for the task increase more rapidly than the number itself. Iwao said the biggest challenge was that the project required “a large amount of storage and memory to calculate.” I needed a whopping 170 terabytes, equivalent to all Internet parts indexed / searched in 2002, to complete. In addition, the longer the supercomputer works on a computer, the greater the risk of a hardware failure that can affect the process.
The execution of the cloud computing prevented these problems from arising and allowed access to 170 terabytes, since Google only had to keep its cloud infrastructure running. In addition, it allows the technological giant to sell researchers access to the digits for $ 40 per day without having to save the massive data set in physical units.
Source: The Keyword
