Ever since the ancient Babylonians, people have been calculating the digits of π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter that starts as 3.1415… and goes on forever. In honor of Pi Day, today March 14 (represented as 3/14 in many parts of the world), we’re excited to announce that we successfully computed π to 31.4 trillion decimal places—31,415,926,535,897 to be exact, or π * 1013. This has broken a GUINNESS WORLD RECORDSTM title , and the first time the record was broken using the cloud, proving Google Cloud’s infrastructure works reliably for long and compute-heavy tasks.
We achieved this feat using y-cruncher, a Pi-benchmark program developed by Alexander J. Yee, using a Google Compute Engine virtual machine cluster. 31.4 trillion digits is almost 9 trillion digits more than the previous world record set in November 2016 by Peter Trueb. Yee independently verified the calculation using Bellard's formula and BBP formula. Here are the last 97 digits of the result.
6394399712 5311093276 9814355656 1840037499 3573460992
1433955296 8972122477 1577728930 8427323262 4739940
You can read more details of this record from y-cruncher's perspective in Yee’s report.