Slashdot Mirror
Google Smashes the World Record For Calculating Digits of Pi (wired.co.uk)
Pi just got bigger. Google's Compute Engine has calculated the most digits of pi ever, setting a new world record. From a report: Emma Haruka Iwao, who works in high performance computing and programming language communities at Google, used infrastructure powered by Google Cloud to calculate 31.4 trillion digits of pi. The previous world record was set by Peter Trueb in 2016, who calculated the digits of pi to 22.4 trillion digits. This is the first time that a publicly available cloud software has been used for a pi calculation of this magnitude.
Iwao became fascinated by pi when she learned about it in math class at school. At university, one of her professors, Daisuke Takahashi, was the record holder for the most-calculated digits of pi using a supercomputer. Now, y-cruncher is the software of choice for pi enthusiasts. Created in 2009, y-cruncher is designed to compute mathematical constants like pi to trillions of digits. "You need a pretty big computer to break the world record," says Iwao. "But you can't just do this with a computer from a hardware store, so people have previously built custom machines." In September of 2018, Iwao started to consider how the process of calculating even more digits of pi would work technically. Something which came up quickly was the amount of data that would be necessary to carry out the calculations, and store them -- 170 terabytes of data, which wouldn't be easily hosted by a piece of hardware. Rather than building a whole new machine Iwao used Google Cloud.
Iwao used 25 virtual machines to carry out those calculations. "But instead of clicking that virtual machine button 25 times, I automated it," she explains. "You can do it in a couple of minutes, but if you needed that many computers, it could take days just to get the next ones set up." Iwao ran y-cruncher on those 25 virtual machines, continuously, for 121 days.
Iwao became fascinated by pi when she learned about it in math class at school. At university, one of her professors, Daisuke Takahashi, was the record holder for the most-calculated digits of pi using a supercomputer. Now, y-cruncher is the software of choice for pi enthusiasts. Created in 2009, y-cruncher is designed to compute mathematical constants like pi to trillions of digits. "You need a pretty big computer to break the world record," says Iwao. "But you can't just do this with a computer from a hardware store, so people have previously built custom machines." In September of 2018, Iwao started to consider how the process of calculating even more digits of pi would work technically. Something which came up quickly was the amount of data that would be necessary to carry out the calculations, and store them -- 170 terabytes of data, which wouldn't be easily hosted by a piece of hardware. Rather than building a whole new machine Iwao used Google Cloud.
Iwao used 25 virtual machines to carry out those calculations. "But instead of clicking that virtual machine button 25 times, I automated it," she explains. "You can do it in a couple of minutes, but if you needed that many computers, it could take days just to get the next ones set up." Iwao ran y-cruncher on those 25 virtual machines, continuously, for 121 days.
If it is an algorithm calculating PI, it would be mathematically provably correct. This formula (there are more than one) calculate PI to arbitrary precision. All that is left to question is the correctness of the implementation.
Since PI has been independently calculated by so many different implementations over time, the initial digits of them can be cross checked for correctness. One early effort, was it in the 1950s maybe(?) calculated PI to 2000 places, and that was called a 'stunt' to show off a computer. If other implementations get the same first 2000 places, can we assume their implementation of whatever formula they use is correct?
Maybe you're saying something different: that someone could commit fraud by stopping generating PI and then substituting a random number generator. In that case, their results will disagree with the next person who tries to beat their record and it will be obvious.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Public-key/private-key encryption systems are based on factoring primes and the premise is no one can identify all the primes in a truly huge list of whole numbers starting at zero.
So now that we know what Google can do in corporate spare time with its processors, maybe someone out there with more knowledge that I have can answer the question "Can two-factor encryption be undermined by the computing power Google used today to generate a Pi Day (March 14th) news release?"
In terms of electricity.
Or how much would it have cost someone who doesn't work at Google.
25 servers, 121 days, 170 terabytes of data.
And then the real question, was it really WORTH it?
BlameBillCosby.com
Actually, if you would describe the whole universe in binary format -or decimal if you wish-, it's already in the number pi. Somewhere.
Can't be, because some universal constants are irrational, and therefore cannot be in another number.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC