Computer Science: Pi To a World Record 5 Trillion Digits

[Frank Booth]

This is a cool story. Ten year ago this would have been hard to accomplish on a PC in any reasonable amount of time, could have taken years if not decades. Now in three months and 6 TB of numbers later, you find the 5 trillionth digit of Pi is 2.

Yesterday, Alexander Yee and Shigeru Kondo announced that they had set a new Pi world record, calculating it to five trillion digits—some 6TB of data—using a single custom built computer. The five trillionth digit? It's a 2.

Kondo, a Japanese engineer, built the $18,000 machine, and Yee, an American computer science student, supplied the software: y-cruncher, a multi-threaded Pi program. The computation took 90 days in all.

This Computer Just Calculated Pi To a World Record 5 Trillion Digits

Here are the computer specs:

Processor
2 x Intel Xeon X5680 @ 3.33 GHz - (12 physical cores, 24 hyperthreaded)
Memory
96 GB DDR3 @ 1066 MHz - (12 x 8 GB - 6 channels) - Samsung (M393B1K70BH1)
Motherboard
Asus Z8PE-D12
Hard Drives
1 TB SATA II (Boot drive) - Hitachi (HDS721010CLA332)
3 x 2 TB SATA II (Store Pi Output) - Seagate (ST32000542AS)
16 x 2 TB SATA II (Computation) - Seagate (ST32000641AS)
Raid Controller
2 x LSI MegaRaid SAS 9260-8i
Operating System
Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise x64
Built By
Shigeru Kondo

 

[Nightmare490]

thats pretty cool xD

 

[-King.exe]

I wish I could have that computer...

 

[labowsky]

wow what a waste of money...all to find another number for pi? some people..

 

[Frank Booth]

Not another number for Pi, to find Pi to the 5 trillionth digit. That is after 3. they calculated 5 trillion digits as in 5,000,000,000,000 digits. If you printed that out it would take a more than tons of pages. Consider pi to a billion digits. It would take 1626 pages in regular font. Now multiply that by 5000, you would need 8,130,000 pages to print that out.

Pi to 1 billion digits, 1,000,000,000.

http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/sipb/contrib/pi/pi-billion.txt

wow what a waste of money...all to find another number for pi? some people..

 

[Winston]

This is amazing

 

[Soul_of_a_Sinner]

omg specs are crazy....!!!!!!

 

[Anchor]

Pretty cool

 

[iEye Captain]

Why is this necessary.

 

[Kim Possible]

imagine how patient they would have to be to discover this

 

[Mystery Penguin]

So umm... how do you/what do you do to calculate pi?

edit: nevermind

found it
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqpWETqoD5Q[/ame]

 

[SingularPoint]

Pi is a pretty big deal in the mathematical world, 5Trillion is pretty damn important.

 

[TheyCallMeC]

Cool Bro, Story.

 

[SoldierX77]

why is this necessary.

why the hell not!

 

[Frank Booth]

Well, this falls under pure mathematics, which can be described as mathematics without any applications or purpose or goal. But then you stumble upon other things like encryption for example, and you find out that discovering large prime numbers makes your encryption much harder to break. The NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians in the US, and maybe the world.

Why is this necessary.

 

[BlackBird.]

Thats cool, I once knew 50 digits of Pi, only know these now: 3.1415926535897931384626338327950288

 

[SuperSillyGecko]

i think its cool but a waste of time!

 

[K^^]

lol @ ppl saying it's a waste of time...

Also, cake > pi

 

[Dr.Compton]

I love pie.