Google Cloud employee beats record by calculating value of Pi to 100 trillion digit

Emma Haruka Iwao, Google’s Cloud developer advocate has broken her own record from three years ago for the number of digits calculated for Pi. She calculated pi to 100 trillion digits using the company’s cloud platform.

Google said in a blogpost that one may not need to calculate “trillions of decimals of π, but this massive calculation demonstrates how Google Cloud’s flexible infrastructure lets teams around the world push the boundaries of scientific experimentation.”

Previously in 2019, Iwao and her team set a record when they carried out a calculation to an accuracy of 31.4 trillion digits.

Iwao said that back in 2019 when we did our 31.4-trillion-digit calculation, egress throughput was only 16 Gbps, meaning that bandwidth has increased by 600% in just three years.

The record has been beaten in between in 2021 by scientists at the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons as they “calculated another 31.4 trillion digits of the constant, bringing the total up to 62.8 trillion decimal places.”

“This increase 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,” said Iwao.

According to the blogpost, the underlying technology that made this possible is Compute Engine, Google Cloud’s secure and customisable compute service, and its several recent additions and improvements.

Although Pi related calculations springs up in almost everything from GPS mapping to solving engineering problems to theory of relativity.  These advanced calculations are mostly used as a standard by computer scientists, to understand, prove and assess the capability and capacity of their hardware.