Google Developer Breaks World Computing Record

Google Cloud Developer Advocate Emma Haruka Iwao set a new world record for computing the most digits of pi using the Google Cloud infrastructure to determine that pi’s 100 trillion decimal place is 0. The project took her just under 158 days and some serious effort.

Iwao’s record broke the 2021 record set by scientists at the Graubünden University of Applied Sciences, who calculated a mathematical constant to 62.8 trillion decimal places. Iwao previously set a world record in 2019 by calculating pi from 31.4 trillion digits.

In 2019, computing 31.4 trillion digits took 121 days, making computing 100 trillion digits this year more than twice as fast.

“This high-scale computing demonstrates how the flexible Google Cloud infrastructure enables teams around the world to push the boundaries of science experiments,” Iwao wrote in a blog post. “This is also an example of the reliability of our products – the program ran for more than five months without node failures and correctly handled every bit in 82 PB of disk I/O. Over the past three years, improvements to our infrastructure and products have made this calculation possible.”