Mathematicians Calculate 10 Trillion Digits of Pi With Xeons

News
By Douglas Perry
published

Mmm...3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201

For the first time mathematicians were able to calculate the Pi constant with 10 trillion decimal digits.

Ten trillion would represent a 1 with 13 zeros. If you were to print that number on paper, you would need about 2.87 billion sheets, based on a standard configuration of about 3500 digits per sheet. Such a stack of paper would reach a height of 21.4 miles.

According to an unofficial announcement the calculation of the 10 trillion digits, it took 371 days and an additional 45 hours to verify on a system equipped with two Intel Xeon X5680 processors, 96 GB of memory and 24 2 TB hard drives. Only the first 5 trillion are offered for download as decimals via five separate downloads totaling 1.91 TB at this time.

The record of 10 trillion records doubles the previous record of 5 trillion digits, which was posted in August of this year.

Douglas Perry
84 Comments Comment from the forums
  • rahulkadukar
    After so many Bulldozer world records a nice one from Intel :)
    Reply
  • pteek
    And the point?

    They could have folded for the cure.
    Reply
  • fancarolina
    I wonder if this scales linearly, would adding two more processors cut the time in half?
    Reply
  • atikkur
    and how it compared to the gpu? would compute it too with more lesser time?
    Reply
  • back_by_demand
    Are they hoping that when they get to something daft like 100 trillion digits is stops recurring and becomes a fixed number?
    Reply
  • andy_newton
    What a useless use of such a computing power. Might as well make a heater out of those Xeon machines for my dog.
    Reply
  • alyoshka
    Another calculation...... that's not to anyone's use..... plus the amount of electricity they wasted calculating that crap, they could have easily folded those 2 processors and got a good number on the folding list atleast helping someone calculate something more meaningful and helpful.
    Reply
  • BlackHawk91
    Why would I want to download 1.91 TB of just numbers
    Reply
  • "waa its not helpful, you should use it for curing blahblah disease"

    stfu. without scientific and mathematical advances, you wouldn't be able to 'fold' at all. this is a mathematical advancement, which will lead to more accurate scientific measurements. if we followed your logic, we'd still be creating scientific ways to determine if someone is a witch.
    Reply
  • Parsian
    - Two Intel Xeon Hexa Core server CPUs: $ 7600.00
    - 96 Giga Bytes of DDR3 RAM: $ 2970.00
    - 2 TB of Harddrive, Xeon Dual Socket Motherboard and Power Supply: $1100.00
    - CALCULATING PIE TO 10 TRILLION DIGITS in 371 days: PRICELESS!!!!!!
    Reply