YouTuber Linus Tech Tips spent a ludicrous amount of money to break the Guinness World Record for most digits of Pi calculated by a computer. Not only did he beat the record, he completely shattered it.
Linus’ previous calculating world record was 32 million digits of Pi calculated in 30 minutes. Meanwhile, the standing record was just over 200 trillion.
So, in order to beat this record, he’d need some major upgrades – but not in the places you’d think. Raw computing power wasn’t the issue, or at least not fully.
What was the reason he needed $1 million worth of parts to make this work and achieve a world record? As it turns out, he needed storage. A lot of it.
Linus Tech Tips shatters Pi calculation world record
You’d think that storing a basic number calculation on a document would be easy, and you’d be right! Numbers on a page take up very little space on a drive. At the point that you get to trillions of numbers, though, things get a little hairy.
In order to fit the full calculation for Pi that Linus wanted to do, he’d need 11.7 billion pages worth of number storage to pull off the feat. So, he built a server farm with enough data storage to keep track of the calculation.
With 2.2 petabytes of storage, around 2,200 terabytes of lightning-fast storage, he was able to achieve the record. That’s where the real expense came in along with the server setup and raw computing power to get through the sheer amount of calculations they’d have to do.
There’s a lot more to it than that, with them also turning a server rack into a dual-CPU setup that can transmit over 100 GB of data per second. This is at a level beyond even what Google‘s cloud servers are capable of.
The calculation took 190 days and was sustained through multiple power outages and the cooling for their server room failing, but, after months of it running and around $6300 USD in power consumption costs, the record was broken.
Linus and co-host Jake don’t think the record will stand for very long, but, for now, it’s theirs.
You can watch the full video below:
Content shared from www.dexerto.com.