The Swiss university now holds the world record for calculating π, calculating it to the nearest 62,8 trillion digits using a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM and 510TB disk space. It only took 108 days and 9 hours of computing.
The Swiss University of Applied Sciences Graubünden claims the world record for the calculation of π (Pi), which it says has been calculated with an accuracy of 62,8 trillion digits.
The university claims to have beaten previous attempts at the calculation by 12,8 trillion digits and done it 3,5 times faster. It also published details about the materials it used for its feat.
The heart of the hardware was a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc 7542 processors. AMD says the CPU cores spend most of their time at 2.9GHz, can burst to 3.4GHz, have 128MB of L3 cache, and operate at 64 threads each. Also used was a server with 1TB of RAM, running Ubuntu Linux 20.04 installed on a pair of SSDs of unspecified size. A JBOD housed 38 7200RPM hard drives, each with a capacity of 16TB.
Thirty-four of these drives were used to store the value of p. Hard drives were chosen over SSDs because SSD performance deteriorated over time, and university designers feared intensive computing could cause problems. Overall, the university said 510TB of disk space was used.
The last ten digits of the 62,8 trillion, which are stored on these disks are 7817924264 and these are now the last known digits of p.
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