Emma Haruka Iwao, a Google employee has broken the Guinness World Record by calculating the most accurate value of pi ever. Emma works in Google as a Cloud Developer Advocate, where she had put out a blog post on 14th March, celebrating the Pi Day.
Pi, basically is an irrational number with infinite decimals that usually is rounded as 3.14. It represents the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter that is used significantly in geometrical calculations.
To calculate the value of Pi, the y-cruncher application was used on Google Cloud virtual machines that required a whopping 170 terabytes of data to complete.
“We achieved this feat using y-cruncher, a Pi-benchmark program developed by Alexander J. Yee, using a Google Compute Engine virtual machine cluster,” the post reads.
It took around four months (121 days) to complete the calculation and computed digits are now published by Google Cloud as disk snapshots that are available to anyone. While the calculation was taking place, the Google Cloud server was kept open to avoid any interruptions.
2019 is marked as the 31st anniversary of Pi Day that was celebrated first in 1988 by physicist Larry Shawand and his peers at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. This is the sixth consecutive year wherein NASA has announced its Pi Day Challenge 2019, wherein it invites its scientists and engineers to solve four problems by using pi.
