It searches for large examples of a special class of prime numbers using computing power donated by individual volunteers via the internet.
But then, in 2021, scientists from the University of Applied Sciences of the Grisons tacked on another 31.4 trillion digits to the figure, raising the total to 62.8 trillion decimal places.
“They can be divided into sections and assigned to separate computational processors, which can then operate almost completely independently of the others,” says Bailey, who in 1996 co-discovered the first formula allowing one to skip ahead to compute distant digits of pi.ĭistributed computing is also being used in a project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search. In 2019, Google Cloud calculated pi the irrational number discovered thousands of years ago out to 31.4 trillion digits. Easily dividedĬalculations of pi are especially suited to distributed computing because they are easily broken into smaller parts, says David Bailey of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, which is setting up cloud-computing facilities to run such problems.
CALCULATE PI TRILLION SOFTWARE
“As a technology company with big data at its core, we are excited by the possibilities of distributed software systems, most notably, Hadoop,” says Eric Baldeschwieler, vice president of Hadoop engineering at Yahoo. “That is why we are building large-scale computation systems,” he says. Sze says the computing power that companies like Yahoo and Google can bring to bear on these problems is a by-product of their need to speedily process vast amounts of web-related data. A recent result showing that any configuration of a Rubik’s cube can be solved in 20 moves or less relied on distributing calculations across many computers at Google, completing in a few weeks what would have taken a single computer 35 years. Yahoo is not the only internet giant delving into abstruse mathematics calculations.
Yahoo programmers have done much of the work to develop Hadoop, though it draws on ideas first published by Google. The computation was made possible by open-source software called Hadoop that allows thousands of networked computers to be used as if they constituted a single extremely powerful machine, a concept called cloud computing. They ran the calculations in July, when they were in low demand for regular work, doing in 23 days what would have taken half a millennium using just one processor. Sze’s program was installed on 1000 Yahoo computers, each equipped with eight processors.
0 kommentar(er)
