A new record for calculating the number Pi

French programmer Fabrice Bellard (also known as the founder of the FFmpeg and QEMU projects) installed on his personal computer running Fedora 10 a new world-wide calculator of the Pi number accurate to 2.7 trillion decimal places (2242301460000 digits in hexadecimal or 2699999990000 in decimal) . This is a curious achievement, because records for the past 14 years have been set on supercomputers worth millions of dollars.

Bellara's computer has the following characteristics:

64-bit version of Fedora 10
Processor: Core i7, 2.93 GHz
Memory: 6 GB
Disk: five Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 disks of 1.5 TB
each File system: ext4

Only one record of the calculated number took 1137 GB. The secret of high performance is that the Frenchman used the Chudnovsky formula , and checked the result using his own method . Details can be found here , and Bellar posted some calculation results on this page.

The preliminary calculation process took 103 days. Then it took 13 days to verify, another 12 days to convert to the decimal system, and 3 days to verify the conversion from binary to decimal system. A total of 131 days.

The previous record for calculating the Pi number was 2.58 trillion decimal places; it was set in August 2009 on the Japanese supercomputer T2K Tsukuba System (640 quad-core AMD Opteron processors). The calculations took 73 hours 36 minutes.

Unfortunately, scientists have not yet found a way to practically apply such an exact value of Pi. Most perfectionist calculations use a maximum of 1000 decimal places.

via linux.org.ru