CERN Computing Seminar

How We Broke the World Record for Computing Digits of Pi

by Emma Haruka Iwao (Google LLC)

Europe/Zurich
31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre (CERN)

31/3-004 - IT Amphitheatre

CERN

105
Show room on map
Description

We have calculated 31.4 trillion digits of Pi in 2019 and broke the world record in the Pi computation. The process took about four months and 200 TiB of storage. Record-breaking Pi calculations have traditionally been done on supercomputers and special-made hardware, but we did it on Cloud for the first time. This talk will discuss the nature of the calculation, the architecture, challenges and techniques, and of course the brief history of Pi computation. Calculating Pi has been the speaker's childhood dream and this talk will also explain how the small dream grew to the new world record.

About the speaker

Emma is a developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform, focusing on application developers experience and high performance computing. She has been a C++ developer for more than 15 years and worked on embedded systems and the Chromium Project. Emma is passionate about learning and explaining the most fundamental technologies such as operating systems, distributed systems, and internet protocols. Besides software engineering, she likes games, traveling, and eating delicious food.

More information