Developer Emma Haruka Iwao set an incredible record using Mountain View's cloud computing system. Here are the details
On March 14, 1988, physicist Larry Shaw first organized Pi Day, a day of celebration in honor of the Greek Pi. The date coincides with both Albert Einstein's birthday and the death of Stephen Hawking, two of the greatest scientists in history. The day has a fundamental value for geeks and nerds, a bit like Valentine's Day for lovers.
Each year more and more initiatives are dedicated to the mysterious number. But this year the celebrations will be really special. Google developer Emma Haruka Iwao, has honored Pi Greek Day in a special way, setting the most accurate value of Pi Greek and thus achieving a new world record. For the first time, she calculated 31 million billion digits of Pi, exactly 31,415,926,535,897. The miracle was accomplished using the Google Cloud platform. This is an important step for the scientific and mathematical world.
Pi Greek Day: developer Emma Haruka Iwao's record
Japanese developer Emma Haruka Iwao has joined the Guinness World Record on Pi Greek Day, also known as Pi Day. Under the supervision of her supervisor Daisuke Takahashi, a professor at the University of Tsukuba's Center for Computational Sciences, she managed to calculate 31 trillion PI numbers using Google's cloud computing system. This is an incredible achievement, considering the 17.3 trillion achieved by professor Bill Gosper in 1985 and the previous record of 22.4 trillion set by Peter Trueb in 2016.
To get to this result, it took the woman 121 days, while the process required the use of 25 Google Cloud systems. All the while, the infrastructure and machines worked non-stop, not least because the computation would fail if there were any interruptions. In fact, such intense work, combined with the huge amount of memory required, could have given problems. But this didn't happen and in the end 170 terabytes of hard disk space were occupied to complete the calculation.
Google, thanks to the work of Emma Haruka Iwao, has therefore managed to demonstrate that Mountain View's cloud computing system can also be used to solve many complex mathematical problems. The procedure of the calculation has been published within the official Google Cloud blog.