Engineers at StorageReview have broken their own world record by calculating pi to a staggering 202,112,290,000,000 digits, shattering the previous record of 105 trillion digits set earlier this year, just in time for World Pi Day (March 14 – March 14).
The previous record, the team’s second attempt, was set using a dual processor 128-core AMD EPYC 9754 Bergamo system, equipped with 1.5TB of DRAM and almost a petabyte of Solidigm QLC SSDs. For this attempt, the team opted for dual Intel Xeon 8592+ CPUs and 28 Solidigm P5336 61.44TB NVMe SSDs.
Key to the challenge was a Dell PowerEdge R760 with a 24-bay NVMe Direct Drives backplane and an internal PCIe switch to enable simultaneous communication between all NVMe drives without the need for additional hardware or RAID devices. The setup was further customized by integrating a PCIe riser from multiple R760s to accommodate additional NVMe SSDs, and enhancing this with larger heatsinks from another R760 to maximize turbo boost capability.
Third time’s the charm
While the previous attempt was plagued by bugs, performance issues, and memory and storage limitations, everything went a lot smoother this time around.
“Not only did the Solidigm drives and the Dell PowerEdge R760 work flawlessly together, the virtually hands-off nature of this new record was a welcome change from the perils of our last record attempt,” said Kevin O’Brien, director of StorageReview Lab.
“After what we went through on the last test run to 105, I’m glad we chose the platform we chose for the big plate,” he continued.
The team used the y-cruncher application and the Chudnovsky algorithm for the calculation, which ran continuously for 85 days (the total calculation run was 100,673 days) and consumed almost 1.5 PB of the available 1,720 PB of data storage.
“This new Pi world record is an exciting achievement because this computational workload is as intense as many of the AI workloads we see today,” said Greg Matson, VP, Solidigm’s Data Center Storage Group. “We’re excited to have had the opportunity to set a new record for calculating Pi with our partners at Dell Technologies and the experts at StorageReview.”
The remarkable calculation of 202 trillion digits of pi is a milestone and pushes the boundaries of computational mathematics once again. However, we suspect that this won’t be the last time StorageReview takes on the challenge.