StorageReview engineers have broken their own world record by calculating pi to a staggering 202,112,290,000,000 digits, shattering their previous record of 105 trillion digits set earlier this year just in time for World Pi Day (March 14-15).
The previous record, the team’s second attempt, was achieved using a dual-processor, 128-core AMD EPYC 9754 Bergamo system equipped with 1.5TB of DRAM and nearly a petabyte of Solidigm QLC SSDs. For this attempt, the team opted for two Intel Xeon 8592+ CPUs and 28 Solidigm P5336 NVMe 61.44TB SSDs.
Key to the challenge was a Dell PowerEdge R760 with a 24-bay NVMe Direct Drives motherboard and an internal PCIe switch to enable simultaneous communication between all NVMe drives without the need for additional hardware or RAID devices. The configuration was further customized by integrating a multi-R760 PCIe riser for additional NVMe SSDs and upgrading it with larger heatsinks from another R760 to maximize turbo-boost capability.
The third time's the charm
While the previous attempt was marred by bugs, performance issues, and memory and storage limitations, things went much more smoothly this time around.
“Not only did the Solidigm drives and the Dell PowerEdge R760 work together seamlessly, but the virtually automatic nature of this new record was a welcome change after the perils of our last record attempt,” said Kevin O’Brien, director of the StorageReview lab.
“After everything we went through in the last test to get to 105, I’m glad we chose the platform we did for the big record,” he continued.
The team used the y-cruncher application and the Chudnovsky algorithm for the calculation, which ran continuously for 85 days (total calculation duration was 100,673 days) and consumed nearly 1.5 PB of the total available 1,720 PB of data storage.
“This new Pi world record is an exciting achievement because this computational workload is as intensive as many of the AI workloads we’re seeing today,” said Greg Matson, vice president of Solidigm’s data center storage group. “We’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to make another record attempt at calculating Pi possible with our partners at Dell Technologies and the experts at StorageReview.”
The remarkable 202 trillion-digit pi calculation is a landmark achievement that pushes the boundaries of computational mathematics even further, but we suspect this won't be StorageReview's last attempt at tackling this challenge.
