Science

Pi Calculation Record Destroyed: 2.5 Trillion Decimals

12:10AM August 19, 2009 | Jesus Diaz

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba, Japan, have demolished the previous world record on the constant pi, more than doubling the amount of decimals to 2.5 trillion. They used a massive parallel computer called the T2K Tsukuba System.

The T2K Tsukuba System is a 640-computer cluster with a processing speed of 95 trillion floating-point operations per second. The T2K calculated a total of 2,576,980,377,524 decimal places in 73 hours 36 minutes, which is a small fraction of the 600 hours taken by the previous record holders—Hitachi and the University of Tokyo—who calculated only 1.2 trillion places.

Why people keep calculating this? Because they can. And because they wanted to test their new toy, according to team leader professor Daisuke Takahashi. And I just want those pi cookies.

Comments

  • matt

    August 19, 2009 at 10:02 AM

    yeah, why try an help cure cancer when you can calculate pi a bit more!

    • Nathan Young

      August 19, 2009 at 12:10 PM

      Yeah I reckon! Who gives a shit – what do they need that info for?

      Besides, can’t they just use 22/7 for their equations and have it infinitely more accurate?

      • Jason

        August 19, 2009 at 3:21 PM

        Are you serious?

        pi does not equal 22/7.

        22/7= 3.1428 etc

        pi= 3.1415 etc

        At least they would be right up to 2.5 trillion significant figures, you made it to 3.

      • Oli

        August 19, 2009 at 3:31 PM

        @Nathan Y

        22/7 doesn’t equal pi

    • Adam

      August 19, 2009 at 6:46 PM

      Thirty decimal places are sufficient to give the circumference of the universe to within a microscopic quantity.

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