A Google employee from Japan named Emma Haruka Iwao, breaks the world record for calculating pi, the infinite number viral to engineering.
Using Google's cloud computing, Iwao successfully calculated pi to 31 trillion digits, surpassing the previous record by 9 trillion.
Google announced her accomplishment on Thursday, which happens to be Pi Day (March 14, or 3/14).
To reach to that humongous number, Iawo was required to calculate huge amounts of data.
Using the program y-cruncher, a Pi-benchmark program developed by Alexander J. Yee on a Google Compute Engine cluster, she calculated 170 terabytes of data using 25 virtual machines.
According to Iwao, this is the first time that cloud computing has been used to calculate pi and break the Guinness World Records.
Pi is the number when dividing a circle's circumference by its diameter.
For most people, they are familiar with the first few digits of pi, which is 3.14. But for mathematicians and scientists alike, the number of pi goes infinitely long.
And extending the known sequence of digits in pi is very difficult because the number follows no set pattern.
Pi is used in engineering, physics, supercomputing and space exploration because its value can be used in calculations for waves, circles and cylinders.
For this vital reason, the more the pi number calculated, the more accurate the pi would be.
The pursuit of longer versions of pi, has been a long-standing pastime among mathematicians. And for Iwao, she said that she had been fascinated by the number since she was a child.
"I feel very surprised. I am still trying to adjust to the reality. The world record has been really hard," said Iwao.
But she still hopes to expand on her work.
"There is no end with pi, I would love to try with more digits."
Previously in 2010, a Yahoo! engineer Nicholas Sze used the company's cloud technology to calculate the 2 quadrillionth digit of pi. This was a calculation that would have taken 500 years on a standard computer at that time.
However, Sze did not calculate all the numbers in between.
The effort to calculate longer pi escalates by the number. What this means, more time and resources are needed than the digits themselves.
"Furthermore, it gets harder to survive a potential hardware outage or failure as the computation goes on," said Iwao.
To put it in perspective, 31 trillion digits of pi would take a human 332,064 years to say. But using Google's cloud computing, Iwao managed to compute that in 111.8 days, or 2,795 machine-days (7.6 machine-years).
