Google has put its cloud to work calculating the value of Pi to 100 trillion digits and has stated that it is a world record for Pi-crunching.
The advertising giant and cloud competitor has detailed the feat, revealing that the work lasted 157 days, 23 hours, 31 minutes and 7,651 seconds.
A program called y-cruncher by Alexander J. Yee did the heavy work, running on a n2-highmem-128 instance with Debian Linux and using 128 vCPU, 864 GB of memory and accessing an output bandwidth of 100 Gbit / s. Google created a network storage cluster, because the n2-highmem-128 reaches a maximum of 257 TB of connected storage for a single virtual machine, and the work required at least 554 TB of temporary storage.
32 storage nodes were pooled, using the n2-highCPU-16 instance, and a single computing node in a cluster that provided 64 iSCSI block storage targets.
H2 instances run Intel Ice Lake and Cascade Lake CPUs, but Google has not said which ones were used for this job.
Google admitted that it did it to show its cloud and the speed it has become since the last time it broke the Pi-munching record when it reached 31.4 trillion digits deep in 2019. The 2019 publication explaining this effort says it consumed 111.8 days of computing, but used a very different platform.
The execution of Pi 2022 clearly worked faster, which will not be a surprise, although the platforms used in 2019 and 2021 were very different, so a comparison from apple to apple is complicated.
The Register has estimated the cost of this effort: n2-highmem-128 instances cost $ 7.706976 an hour at list price, so the cost of the computer server was about $ 29,000. Instances n2-highCPU-16 cost $ 0.57 an hour, or about $ 70,000 for all work. Data movement would have added a lot to the task.
And all to produce a trillion digits of Pi.
Unfortunately, the Google post does not mention whether or not all of these numbers contained any interesting patterns that might hint at the nature of the cosmos, or whether any recreation of Shakespeare appeared.
You probably need more than one Debian box to find out. ®