On Monday, Swiss researchers confirmed that they had calculated the value of Pi to 62.8 trillion digits, breaking its previous world record of 50 trillion digits, held by Timothy Mullican. As per the Graubuenden University of Applied Sciences, the calculation took 108 days and 9 hours employing a supercomputer and is 3.5 times faster than the previous one.
According to the University Center for Data Analytics, Visualisation and Simulation, the efforts for this calculation were “two times faster than the record set by Google using its cloud (96-vCPU) in 2019, and 3.5 times faster than the last world record”.
Researchers said that they are waiting for the Guinness Book of Record to certify their accomplishment and to publish the full value of Pi. For now, they have only revealed the ultimate ten digits that they calculated for Pi: 7817924264 (the last known digits of Pi right now).
The previous world record for Pi calculation was set, calculating 50 trillion digits on 29th January 2020, using the Y-Cruncher computer program by applying the Chudnovsky algorithm.
Pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter, is a number with infinite digits following the decimal. The Swiss University has given information about the hardware used during the calculation. They used a pair of 32 core AMD Eypc 7542 processors to power the rig and a JBOD accommodated 38, 7200 RPM hard disks having 16 TB capacity each.
The Swiss University ensured that the experience they built up calculating Pi value could apply in many areas like a simulation of fluid dynamics, RNA analysis, and textual analysis.