An engineer from StorageReview has broken his own world record by calculating Pi to an astounding 202,112,290,000,000 digits, beating the previous record of 105 trillion digits recorded earlier this year in time for World Pi Day (March 14th).
The previous record was achieved on the team’s second attempt using a dual processor 128-core AMD EPYC 9754 Bergamo system with 1.5 TB of DRAM and nearly a petabyte of Solidigm QLC SSDs. For this attempt, the team opted for dual Intel Xeon 8592+ CPUs and 28 Solidigm P5336 61.44 TB NVMe SSDs.
Key to this challenge was a Dell PowerEdge R760 with a 24-bay NVMe direct drive backplane and internal PCIe switch, allowing simultaneous communication between all NVMe drives without the need for additional hardware or RAID devices. The setup was further customized by integrating multiple R760’s PCIe risers to accommodate additional NVMe SSDs, and backing them up with another R760’s large heatsink to maximize Turbo Boost capabilities.
Third time’s a charm
While previous attempts were marred by bugs, performance issues, and memory and storage constraints, things went much smoother this time around.
“Not only did the Solidigm drives and the Dell PowerEdge R760 work together perfectly, but this new record was achieved almost hassle-free, which was a welcome change after the peril of our previous record attempt,” said Kevin O’Brien, StorageReview Lab Director.
“After what we experienced on our last test run on the 105, we’re happy we chose this platform for this big record,” he continued.
The team used the y-cruncher application and the Chudnovsky algorithm for the calculations, which ran continuously for 85 days (the entire calculation run was 100.673 days) and consumed approximately 1.5 PB of the total available data storage of 1.720 PB.
“This new world record for pi is an incredibly exciting achievement as this computational workload is as intensive as many AI workloads we see today,” said Greg Matson, VP of Solidigm’s Data Center Storage Group. “We’re pleased to have the opportunity to work with our partners at Dell Technologies and the experts at StorageReview to deliver another record-breaking attempt to calculate pi.”
While the astonishing achievement of calculating 202 trillion digits of Pi is a groundbreaking achievement that further pushes the boundaries of computational mathematics, we have a sneaking suspicion that this may not be StorageReview’s last attempt.
