An American computer storage company has calculated the value of Pi to 105 trillion digits, breaking the previous world record.
NASA scientists use Pi with only 16 decimal places. (Photo: NASA).
On Pi Day, March 14, Solidigm, a company based in California, announced that it has calculated Pi to 105 trillion digits, according to Live Science. The computation took 75 days to complete and utilized up to one million gigabytes of data, setting a new record for this infinite constant. Pi (symbol π) is a mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Pi does not have an exact value and is often approximated as 3.14 for convenience in calculations. Discovering longer sequences of Pi has long been a challenge for both amateur and professional mathematicians and computer scientists, requiring computing power equivalent to that of hundreds of thousands of smartphones.
Finding the digits beyond the decimal point of Pi does not have a significant impact on mathematics, as calculations rarely require more than a few dozen digits. For instance, NASA scientists only need the first 16 digits of Pi for most of their cosmic research. Instead, computing Pi to its most precise value has long been used as a benchmark for testing new computer programs and data storage systems.
For comparison, if you were to write out the new value of Pi on paper in a continuous line using a font size of 10, the number would stretch approximately 3.7 billion kilometers, which means it could extend from Earth to somewhere between Uranus and Neptune. The computation was carried out using 36 proprietary solid-state drives (SSD) from the company, which collectively stored around one petabyte (one million gigabytes) of data. The processors also needed to perform calculations with more powerful components to reduce time. However, large and reliable storage drives were more crucial due to the massive data throughput required throughout the process.
According to Brian Beeler, the owner of Solidigm, this is a significant achievement. In April 2023, Solidigm calculated Pi to 100 trillion digits, a record previously set by Google Cloud in 2022. Prior to that, the record was 62.8 trillion digits, calculated in 108 days by a supercomputer at the University of Applied Sciences Grisons in Switzerland in 2021. Using human memory, the current world record for the most digits of Pi memorized (70,000 digits) was set by Rajveer Meena at VIT University in India on March 21, 2015, according to the Guinness World Records.
