Whoa. Pi has been calculated out to 31.4 trillion decimals, Google announces on Pi Day

Just in time for Pi Day, a new world record has been set for calculating the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.

On Thursday, Google revealed that developer advocate Emma Haruka Iwao, with the help of the tech giant's cloud platform, calculated pi to 31.4 trillion decimal places, beating the previous record by nearly 9 trillion digits.

To do this, Iwao's team used a program called ycruncher capable of computing pi to trillions of digits powered by 25 virtual machines run through Google Cloud's Compute Engine.

"The biggest challenge with pi is that it requires a lot of storage and memory to calculate," said Iwao, who has worked with the company for nearly four years, in a blog posted published Thursday by Google.

The calculation required 170 terabytes of data, about the same amount of data as the entire Library of Congress print collection, Google said.

After about fourth months of calculating, Iwao arrived at the record-breaking result.

"The world of math and sciences is full of records just waiting to be broken," Iwao wrote in a separate Google post. "We had a great time calculating 31.4 trillion π digits, and look forward to sinking our teeth into other great challenges." 

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