Posted in September 2009

Pi calculated to 2.5 trillion digits

Posted on 28 September, 2009

T2K Tsukuba System at the Center for Computational Sciences, University of Tsukuba

Researchers at the Center for Computational Sciences of the University of Tsukuba have set a new world record by calculating the value of pi to 2‚576‚980‚370‚000 digits.

The calculation, which more than doubles the 2002 record of 1‚241‚100‚000‚000 digits held by the Information Technology Center of the University of Tokyo and Hitachi Ltd., was performed on the university's T2K Tsukuba System, a massively parallel supercomputer consisting of 640 high-performance servers.

With a processing speed of 95 teraflops, the T2K Tsukuba System supercomputer was able to perform the calculation in 73 hours and 36 minutes. By comparison, it took the previous record holders over 8 times longer to calculate half as many digits.

Pi is defined as a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. Since Archimedes calculated the value of pi to 3.14 in the third century B.C‚ there has been much effort to calculate it more accurately and to better understand its nature.

The objective of the University of Tsukuba's pi calculation was to test the performance and reliability of the T2K Tsukuba System, which the university has been using since 2008. In addition to setting a new record, no failures occurred during the computation‚ thereby verifying the high reliability of the supercomputer.

Links:
- New World Record Calculation Pi [University of Tsukuba press release]