They did it again: Tech publisher keeps on breaking Pi Calculation World Record — they almost doubled the previous one, reaching 202 trillion digits in 100 days and used 1.5PB of SSD storage

Engineers at StorageReview have shattered their own world record by calculating pi to an astounding 202,112,290,000,000 digits, smashing its previous record of 105 trillion digits set earlier this year in time for World Pi Day (March 14 – 3/14).

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 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 among all NVMe drives without the need for extra hardware or RAID devices. The setup was further customized by integrating a PCIe riser from multiple R760s for additional NVMe SSDs and enhancing it with larger heatsinks from another R760 to maximize turbo-boost capability.

Third time’s the charm

While the previous attempt was marred by bugs, performance-related issues, and memory and storage constraints, things ran much smoother this time around.

“Not only did the Solidigm drives and Dell PowerEdge R760 work together flawlessly, the nearly hands-off nature of this new record was a welcomed change after the perils of our last record attempt,” said Kevin O’Brien, StorageReview Lab Director.

“After what we went through on the last test run to 105, I am glad that 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 (the entire calculation run was 100.673 days), and consumed almost 1.5PB of the available total 1.720PB of data storage.

“This new Pi world record is an exciting accomplishment because this computational workload is as intense as many of the AI workloads we are seeing today,” said Greg Matson, VP, Solidigm’s Data Center Storage Group. “We are thrilled to have had the opportunity to enable another record-breaking attempt to calculate Pi with our partners at Dell Technologies and the experts at StorageReview.”

The remarkable 202 trillion digit pi calculation serves as a landmark achievement, pushing the boundaries of computational mathematics further, but we have a sneaky suspicion that this won’t be StorageReview’s final run at the challenge.