A group of
scientists based out of Switzerland has calculated the value of ‘Pi’ to a new
world record of 62.8 trillion figures using a supercomputer. The previous world
record for the calculation of pi’s value was till 50,000 digits. “The
calculation took 108 days and nine hours,” the Graubuenden University of
Applied Sciences said in a statement. The record for calculating the value of Pi
to highest number of digits was previously held by Google.

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The Swiss
scientists made the record in nearly half the time, according to the university.
Researchers are awaiting the Guinness Book of Records to certify the feat.   

Pi is the
ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It is an “irrational number”
beginning with 3.14 and an infinite number of digits following the decimal
point. Calculating Pi’s approximate value is considered an unofficial benchmark
in high-performance computing.

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The Swiss team
said that their high-performance computer completed Pi calculation to a
precision of 62,831,853,071,796 digits. “Therefore, an additional 12.8 trillion
digits of Pi are now known,” the scientists noted.

Researchers
said that such intense calculation requires enormously high amounts of memory,
both RAM and swap space, and low memory access times. “Saving the result of Pi
alone requires 63 terabytes of storage space. The caching of the calculation
consumes up to 1 TB of hard disk space again,” the scientists said.

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They added
that swapping requires a further 310 TB of storage space and 180 TB storage is
required for backing up caching data.

At full capacity,
the calculation requires constant air cooling so that the computer’s systems
don’t overheat. Since the scientists are still waiting for Guinness to certify
their accomplishment, they have released only the last 10 digits from their Pi
calculation as “7817924264”.

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Discussing
the practical aspects of their feat, the team of scientists said that their
experience in calculating Pi could be applied in other areas such as “RNA
analysis, simulations of fluid dynamics and textual analysis”.