Pi Day: Google calculates most accurate value of Pi

Google also made records for calculating Pi value on commercial cloud.

Google beat the previous record by more than 9 trillion digits of the Pi value. (Google)

Google had the craziest way to celebrate Pi Day by making the most accurate Pi calculation till date. What's even interesting is that Google used cloud to make the Pi calculation.

This feat was achieved by Emma Haruka Iwao, a Cloud Developer Advocate at Google. In a blog post, Emma said that they managed to successfully compute the Pi value to 31.4 trillion decimal places or 31,415,926,535,897. Emma further explains that this was possible using a Pi-benchmark, y-cruncher which was developed by Alexander J. Yee on Google Compute Engine virtual machine cluster.

This experiment consumed 170 terabytes of data and took almost four months to complete. It started on September 22 last year and finally ended on January 21 earlier this year. Yee also verified the calculation using Bellard's 7-term BBP formula.

In doing so, Google has also set a new Guinness World Record beating the old one by 9 trillion digits more. The previous world record was 22.4 trillion digits and it was achieved back in November, 2016 by Peter Trueb. Trueb also used y-cruncher to calculate Pi value, but Google set new records for using the cloud and SSD drives as well.

March 14 is celebrated as Pi day or 3.14 which are the first three digits of Pi. It is defined as the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter. The interesting thing about Pi is that it's value is infinite in length.