Japanese Researchers Calculate pi To 10 Trillion Digits

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And the impressive feat of the day goes to these guys for calculating pi to ten trillion digits (and it only took 371 days to do it). :eek:

Due to the size of this computation, a tremendous amount of memory was needed: Roughly 44 TB* of disk was needed to perform the computation. Another 7.6 TB of disk was needed to store the compressed output of decimal and hexadecimal digits. If the digits were stored in an uncompressed ascii text file, the combined size of the decimal and hexadecimal digits would be 16.6 TB.
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Superdemon said:
How is this even remotely useful?
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The values of e and π are irrational to the point where they are considered transcendental.
Finding proof of rationality answers a thousands of years old question, and effectively opens the door for further investigation of some facets of algebra.
 
naninani said:
The values of e and π are irrational to the point where they are considered transcendental.
Finding proof of rationality answers a thousands of years old question, and effectively opens the door for further investigation of some facets of algebra.
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We have already proven that pi is irrational - over 100 years ago.
 
Big deal. I calculated the fraction of One Third to 20 trillion digits, all in my head.

With a tiny fraction of 10 trillion digits, you could calculate the circumference of the universe, from the radius of the universe, to within the width of an electron. Supposing I'm willing to tell you the exact circumference of the universe.

It's not remotely useful.
 
mmm pi pie.
pie-pi.jpg
 
Who cares? The real question is, how long would it take 1 million monkeys with numpads to calculate pi to one trillion? Now that has some real world usage.
 
Description and pictures of their set-up are here: http://www.numberworld.org/misc_runs/pi-10t/details.html

Looks like this is more of a competition, much like world record OC or benchmark, not actually useful. Compute the most digits of Pi in the least amount of time.

Interesting to see how many HDD failures they had. They had to routinely roll back to good backups loosing weeks/months of processing after each HDD failure.
 
Based on super pi ratings, if they had of used a bulldozer based system they could have got at least 3 years of research grants :D
 
Morgansaur said:
Now if only they could calculate how to build flood walls around their nuclear reactors.
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They had 19 foot tall flood walls.

Are you a nuclear safety risk analyst? Could you have told them that they needed to assume a 45 foot tall tsunami?

I guarantee you that no reactor in the world has a flood wall that tall.
 
I calculated how many dinosaurs it would have taken to win WW2 without a shot fired by the Allies.
 
1 said:
In terms of a percentage of all the digits of pi, they have calculated 0%.
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Depends when you get down to where the distance between digits is less than 1 planck length. Of course that would depend on the size of the radius...
 
The Earthquake...



For a moment I pause to grasp what has happenned in Japan...

And the relief to have felt when I finally got that email from Shigeru Kondo

telling me that's he's okay.



Makes us wonder why we were still running this...
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from their log.

good thing it didnt cause another roll back. They sure went through drives fairly often.
 
I'm surprised a Linux distro wasn't used for this, but Windows 7!
 
Ugh, what a ghetto storage setup. No wonder they had so many hard drive failures.
 
Fail.

No mention of how much over stock did they overclock.

No mention of the cooling set up used.

No mention of idle and load temperatures*

No md5 hash to check the validity of the result.

And was it Prime stable to start with??


*under different ambient temperatures (50F, 80F, 100F, 120F).
 
Nice but I'm sure there are more useful things they could have spent 371 computing days on.
 
Should of used those computers on figuring out how to run a safe nuclear power plant. Or how to make MOTHRA fight GODZILLA a reality.
 
The calculation of pi is useful because its theorized to be a finite number and if we get the complete number of pi we will theoretically be able to design frictionless disk (think UFO's) that are capable of unfathomable speeds and will require next to no energy for propulsion. Basically, getting the number pi will give us huge huge break thorough in propulsion technology.
 
Runningflame570 said:
That is why it took them so long.
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Yep, they had to use a Widows program because there was no good alternative for Linux. Well...there was ONE...but they didn't feel like spending 400 days typing terminal commands just to download pieces of the program only to find out that they couldn't even install it until they spent another 400 days manually packing the files in to an installable archive that probably wouldn't even work because it doesn't support whatever 'flavor' of Linux it is they might be using.

All in all, I'd say they saved themselves a lot of time. ;)

:D
 
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