For the first time in human history, 314 trillion digits of pi have been calculated past the decimal point — and the hard drive pictured above became a true hero of the achievement.
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Pi is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, and what makes it special is that its decimal digits never end.
Calculations of pi have been carried out for thousands of years, but only in the era of modern computing has humanity gained the ability to perform calculations at superhuman speeds and scales.
The new record was set by StorageReview using a single server that ran continuously for four months. The milestone of 314 trillion digits is a tribute to pi's most familiar shorthand — 3.14.
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What makes this story especially fascinating is the hardware behind it.
Pi calculations are typically performed on distributed networks of computers, whose combined processing power delivers far greater computational capacity than any single server.
This time, a single Dell server was used.
It was equipped with 2 powerful AMD processors featuring 384 physical processing cores, 1.5 TB of DDR5 RAM, and 2.5 PB of high-speed storage in the form of 40 Micron SSDs, each with a capacity of 61.44 TB.
Storage quality was a critical aspect of the process.
Although 1.5 TB of RAM is substantial by any measure, it is still not enough to hold the staggering volume of trillions of digits required for the calculation.
The SSDs effectively served as RAM through a technique called SWAP — with the drawback that SSDs are faster and less durable than true RAM.
The fact that the Micron drives survived continuous read and write operations at maximum workload for four straight months is a remarkably impressive proof of capability.
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Another important aspect of the process was the use of Linux rather than Windows Server.
Windows communicates with storage drives using an aging protocol called SCSI.
Communication between Windows and modern SSDs requires back-and-forth translation that severely degrades performance — only recently did Microsoft announce an updated driver that will enable direct communication.
Using Linux eliminated that bottleneck entirely, allowing the processor to communicate with the drives at maximum speed.
The server itself also contributed to performance, as it contains a direct communication path between the SSDs and the processor, bypassing general-purpose PCIe switches along the way.
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Although this achievement may appear to have no practical use, the technological feat behind it is highly significant.
Complex computations — such as those involved in artificial intelligence and human genome research — demand the best available hardware and computational methods to keep pushing humanity forward, and every such milestone is another important step along that path.
*Pictured: One of the SSDs used to perform the calculation | Credit: StorageReview*
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👋 Hi, I'm Shlomo Strauss — follow me for more fascinating content on science and technology.