Record-breaking calculation of 105 trillion digits of Pi

An American computer storage company calculated the number Pi to 105 trillion digits, breaking the previous world record.

NASA scientists only use the number Pi with 16 digits after the decimal point. Photo: *NASA*

On Pi Day, March 14, Solidigm, an American company in California, announced that it had calculated Pi to 105 trillion decimal places, according to Live Science . The calculation took 75 days to complete and used up to a million gigabytes of data, setting a new record for calculating this endless constant. Pi (symbol π) is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi has no exact value, but is often taken as an approximation of 3.14 for ease of calculation. Finding a longer Pi has long been a challenge for amateur and professional mathematicians and computer scientists, requiring the computing power equivalent to hundreds of thousands of smartphones.

Finding the number of digits after the decimal point of Pi has no real impact on mathematics, since calculations rarely require more than a few dozen digits. For example, NASA scientists use only the first 16 digits of Pi to perform most of their research on the universe. Instead, calculating the number to the most precise value has long been used as a standard for testing new computer programs and data storage systems.

For comparison, if you typed the new Pi onto a piece of paper, row by row, using a size 10 font, the number would be about 3.7 billion kilometers long, meaning it could stretch from Earth to somewhere between Uranus and Neptune. The calculation was performed using 36 of the company’s proprietary solid-state drives (SSDs), storing a total of about a petabyte (a million gigabytes) of data. The processor also needed more powerful components to perform the calculation, which would reduce the time it took. However, high-capacity, reliable storage was more important because of the massive amount of data needed to be transferred throughout the process.

According to Brian Beeler, CEO of Solidigm, this is a major achievement. In April 2023, Solidigm calculated Pi to 100 trillion digits, a record achieved by Google Cloud in 2022. The previous record was 62.8 trillion digits, calculated in 108 days by a supercomputer at the University of Applied Sciences Grisons in Switzerland in 2021. Using the human brain, the current world record for Pi with the most digits after the decimal point (70,000) was set by Rajveer Meena at VIT University in India on March 21, 2015, according to Guinness World Records.

An Khang (According to Live Science )

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