Comment on KIOXIA and Linus Media Group Set World Record for Pi Calculation
solrize@lemmy.ml 15 hours ago
Says they used a cluster with 2.2PB of flash drives (that was Kioxia’s contribution) and the calculation took 7.5 months. Article is otherwise sort of useless. I’d like to know more technical and mathematical details. It gives the “spoiler” that the 300 trillionth digit of pi is 5, but that was already relatively easy to compute using the Borwein-Bailey-Plouffe algorithm and was probably already known. The BBP algorithm lets you compute a specific digit like the 300 trillionth, using fairly little memory and much less compute time than computing all of the digits.
hakase@lemm.ee 15 hours ago
I wanted to just post the video, which has a lot more information (though not the kind of info you’re looking for), but I didn’t know if an LTT video was an “official” enough source for this community.
I suppose this was probably the first time that all of the digits of pi up to 300 trillion were calculated, even if the 300 trillionth specifically was already known.
solrize@lemmy.ml 15 hours ago
Yes, that’s the idea, it’s just that the “spoiler” likely only revealed something that was already known (that specific digit), or at any rate, something that could be computed on a much smaller computer and in less time. Mostly though, that’s a bit of mathematically interesting info.
I don’t feel like watching a video but maybe there will be a more informative article sometime. I wonder if they used some existing software like Y-cruncher: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-cruncher
hakase@lemm.ee 15 hours ago
They did use Y-cruncher.
solrize@lemmy.ml 15 hours ago
Cool, yeah, the digits themselves are at most 0.5 byte each ;). I don’t know enough about the higher level algorithm to say exactly how the rest of the storage is being used. There is a book called “Pi and the AGM” about pi computation and similar algorithms that is supposed to be really good, but it looks over my head mathematically.
alphabethunter@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
The calculation technically only takes 12 straight days to compute, but they had many interruptions over the process, sometimes having to fully restart the whole calculation.