9 ms·
Calculating a record-breaking 31.4T digits of Pi with GCP
- CRUDite 8y agoPerhaps they subliminally hope the final pages of the novel "contact" to be real
- AgentK20 8y agoAbsolute madmen
- dvhh 8y agoThat could explain the slight trouble they had recently
- philshem 8y agoThe piano music for each digit at the A-π (API) page is particularly beautiful https://pi.delivery/#demosmusic https://pi.delivery/#demosmusic
- trollied 8y agoMartin Krzywinski has produced some brilliant Pi posters. http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/pi/piday/ http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/pi/piday/ I have the "dots" one. https://fineartamerica.com/featured/768-digits-of-pi-up-to-feynman-point-e-and-phi-martin-krzywinski.html https://fineartamerica.com/featured/768-digits-of-pi-up-to-f...
- nothanksmydude 8y agoSimilar, but metal. This is the extended verison that goes to 110 digits. "The numbers and rests in the formula translate to 16th notes on the kick drum, and 16th note rests. There is no kick drum beats where there are snare drums. With the decimal point BEFORE the number, and starting with the first number, move that many decimal points to the right and insert that many 16th note rests. Use one 16th note rest to divide the numbers you passed (when applicable). Continue on throughout the rest of the figure. No repeats." The details of the video have the full explanation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh-EdSbfdrA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh-EdSbfdrA
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- leowoo91 8y agoLiterally this should contain all the songs written, and the ones haven't written yet.
- Medox 8y agoI wonder if the blockchain (or contract?) approach could break the record after combining all that gpu power.
- dcow 8y agoThat’s not quite how it works.
- YayamiOmate 8y agoWhy not? It is. Calculating pi is trivially parallelizable. If you wrote good kernels, calculation distribution could be exactly the same.
- purerandomness 8y agoBut what role would a Blockchain have in the parallel computation of pi?
- berbec 8y agoBesides Block chain being useless for this purpose, calculations of pi are disk io limited at the current time.
- shawabawa3 8y agoBlockchains that perform computation (e.g Eth), aren't doing parallel computation as we think of it. They perform the same computation on every node, there's no way to split up the work between nodes
- smarx007 8y agoHow Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? (NASA/JPL): https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do-we-really-need/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/2016/3/16/how-many-decimal...
- StreakyCobra 8y agoIn short 40 is already crazy too many digits for most if not all applications. Yet in the original article they say «Granted, most scientific applications don’t need π beyond a few hundred digits, …». Is there scientific applications where they would really need more than 40? Or is it just the author making some guess?
- WilliamEdward 8y agoWhether there's a use for 40 digits or 40 trillion digits, needing more accuracy is not why we find these numbers. There's no 'need' for this at all. The same way there's no 'need' to find bigger prime numbers. We're just seeing how far we can go, maybe seeing a new pattern emerge.
- klohto 8y ago> The same way there's no 'need' to find bigger prime numbers. From cryptography standpoint, there is always a need to find bigger prime number. I wouldn't compare this with a Pi.
- patrickg_zill 8y agoHow can you tell if the results are accurate?
- curiousgal 8y agoWhy would you need to do that? It's not like those digits are useful for anything at all.
- onion2k 8y agoI guess it depends on your definition of "useful", but one potential way to use pi would be as a way to transmit compressed data incredibly efficiently. If you could find the data you want to transmit in pi somewhere you'd only need to transmit an offset and a length to send anything than can be represented numerically. The hard part would be finding what you want to send though... ;)
- gliptic 8y agoUnless it's not clear, the size of that offset would be about the same size as whatever you wanted to encode.
- mkup 8y agoOffset and a length in Pi are not going to be shorter than original data to transmit.
- thaumaturgy 8y agoNot necessarily. A double gets you pretty far into pi for a cost of just 8 bytes. A little bit of rounding, or checksumming, or other tomfoolery in principle should make it possible to reach absurdly far into pi for a byte or two more.
- onion2k 8y agoIf your offset is a million digits long you need to be sending more than a million digits of data to make it worthwhile, but the chance of your chosen million digits being available in that space is effectively zero. :)
- geekuillaume 8y agoI'm curious, did someone estimate how much it would cost to replicate this experiment on GCloud with the same infrastructure?
- triodan 8y agoUsing GCP's pricing calculator and the specs described in the blog, it's around 170,000 USD to run it for 3 months. https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=ef2329f6-f194-4179-bedb-5640a9fc722c https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=ef2329f6-f1...
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoIf you can break it into appropriate jobs that can handle interruptions, you should use interruptible instances to save money. And you really need to be able to handle that anyway in case an instance fails midway.
- s_gourichon 8y agoThis is a time someone must cite 3Blue1Brown: [(183) The most unexpected answer to a counting puzzle - YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfHFsfGXjs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEfHFsfGXjs)
- hokobomo 8y ago> March 14 (represented as 3/14 in many parts of the world) haha
- isostatic 8y agoThe US and Philippines use month-day-year. The rest of the world doesn't. The most popular format is Day-Month-Year, followed by Year-Month-Day.
- s_gourichon 8y agoYes. ISO chooses year-month-day, which puts largest component first and smallest last. This has the nice benefit that treating it as a string and doing alphanumerical sort matches the actual day sort. Ref. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
- isostatic 8y agoThere are benefits to both little endian and big endian
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoYes, but the US uses middle endian.
- rkangel 8y agoThe main benefit of Y-M-D, is that no-one uses Y-D-M, and the 'Y' component is easily recognisable. So if you use Y-M-D, then everyone knows it's Y-M-D and there is no ambiguity.
- isostatic 8y agoI found out recently the x509/tls certa are YYMMDD 200122 For example. Amazing.
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- zimbatm 8y agothis is perfect for mounting the Pi filesystem :) https://github.com/philipl/pifs https://github.com/philipl/pifs
- dheera 8y ago"31,415,926,535,897 to be exact, or π * 10^13" Uhm no, you mean, approximately π * 10^13.
- perl4ever 8y agoExactly ⌊π * 10^13⌋
- aaaaaaaaaaab 8y agoMeh, throwing raw power at the problem is not that impressive. Bellard's [1] 2009 record was much more impressive, because he used a clever formula to break the existing record with a mere (albeit beefy) desktop computer: https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/ https://bellard.org/pi/pi2700e9/ The record he broke with his desktop PC was made using a supercomputer cluster. [1] If somebody is not familiar with him, he is also the original author of QEMU, ffmpeg and the Tiny C Compiler.
- wetpaws 8y agoI don't think it's about the PI tbh, more like a pretty stunt to me
- LinuxBender 8y agoThey did it so I could say, There are three kinds of mathematicians, those that can count and those that can not.
- arethuza 8y agoAnd JSLinux - full PC emulation in your browser (this never ceases to amaze me no matter how often I play with it): https://bellard.org/jslinux/ https://bellard.org/jslinux/
- burk96 8y agoThere are quite a bit of other very impressive projects under their belt as well. QEMU and FFMPEG to name some I use daily. What a legend.
- ousta 8y agoI struggle to see any complexity into google approach - unlike bellard's one that is an amazing feat. They basically pulled more machine to compute more. nothing really impressive. pretty much any dev with that computing power could have done it
- 8y ago
- fhoffa 8y agoDon't miss the video on how Emma did this: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvEvTcXF-4Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvEvTcXF-4Q (length 3:14)
- megaremote 8y agoDoes pi compress? It must if it is only numbers, but only by a half?
- mcbain 8y agoTrillions of digits of Pi compresses insanely well - to Pi, of course. The decompression just takes a while.
- dekhn 8y agopi is effectively randomly distributed (I don't know if this is proven) which means it would be effectively impossible to compress is using conventional entropy or dictionary based techniques. However, there are compact formulas which can generate pi to arbitrary precision, trading off compute time with space. So it;'s effectively compressible, I guess this relates to Kolomogorov complexity in some way.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoIf it's stored as ASCII/UTF8 text, then it will be compressible because it's just numbers. On the other hand, if they somehow have a number format that spans that many digits then it'll already be perfectly efficient.
- dekhn 8y agoUm, sure. But I don't think anybody really cares if pi is compressible because it's ASCII representation of numbers. At best, you'd be getting some constant factor improvement due to the unused bits, but there's nothing specific to pi in that.
- rkangel 8y agoIf you consider compression to be 'representing information in a way that you can recover with some processing (from less information)', then any programmatic definition of Pi is an enormous compression of the value.
- techbio 8y ago
- atomical 8y agoWhat is the file size?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- maxst 8y agoAre the some PI-like constants, but much harder to calculate? Like even a million digits would be hard to calculate?
- StrangeDoctor 8y agoThat's actually most numbers, but we don't know any yet. https://youtu.be/5TkIe60y2GI https://youtu.be/5TkIe60y2GI numberphile (math YouTube series) describing some related concepts here.
- pgrote 8y agoWhy did she stop calculating? A time limit or resource issue?
- DougBTX 8y agoThey calculated π * 10^13 digits for Pi day (14th March, 3/14 in month/date format) so it was an artistic/aesthetic choice.
- angrygoat 8y agoAlexander Yee's writeup is interesting – CPU utilisation was only about 12%, they encountered quite nasty I/O bottlenecks (particularly for writes.) http://www.numberworld.org/blogs/2019_3_14_pi_record/ http://www.numberworld.org/blogs/2019_3_14_pi_record/ Contradicts the Google blog a little, especially where he points out that they hit performance issues with live migration (Google said it worked fine without impact on the application.)
- bluedino 8y agoHe's also the author of one of the most famous Stack Overflow answers of all time, 'Why is it faster to process a sorted array than an unsorted array?' https://stackoverflow.com/a/11227902/1760335 https://stackoverflow.com/a/11227902/1760335
- sigi45 8y agoAwesome, now we are a game of life which has generated Pi to 31.4T digits at least once :D
- sverige 8y agoWhenever I see the ridiculous number of places to which pi has been calculated, I wonder if anyone has checked to see if there is a repeating pattern. I mean, 31 trillion places leaves a lot of possibilities for repetition of a couple of billion digits. Or is my understanding of what constitutes an irrational number outdated? Is there another definition that precludes even looking for repetition in hopes of finding a denominator?
- gibspaulding 8y agoPi can be proven to be an irrational number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrational https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_that_%CF%80_is_irrationa...
- hi41 8y agoQuick question. Is 22/7 an approximate value of pie? What is the correct formula and why?
- pmiller2 8y ago22/7 is an approximation for pi. I prefer to use 355/113, which has an error of about 2.7x10^-7. The reason these are good approximations is that they’re convergents for the continued fraction for pi. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continued_fraction
- DannyB2 8y agoNot consecutively repeating patterns. But if you take any length pattern of digits, it would repeat an infinite number of times. Let's take a one digit pattern, say '5'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '5's. Now consider a longer pattern '53'. Since the digits of pi continue forever, there would be an infinite number of '53's. In fact, each 53 will be from one of the infinite number of '5's in the previous pattern '5'. Now consider a longer pattern '537' . . . . . . to continue . . . It was long ago when I read Contact (the book), so I hope I don't misremember this too badly. At the end of the book the main character was given a budget, lab, resources, etc. They were working on looking for a message in the digits of Pi. Eventually her beeper beeped and they had found one! It must be woven into the fabric of the universe. I think any sequence of digits that had any kind of message you are going to eventually find in Pi. Just like, if you look long enough you'll find a 5. If you keep looking you'll eventually find a 53. Keep looking, you'll eventually find a 537. Etc.
- psadri 8y agoDid they find the patterns (circle?) that was referend at the end of Carl Sagan’s Contact book?
- anth_anm 8y ago"we have lots of compute resources and access to software, aren't we awesome?"
- abdulhaq 8y agoYou don't get those gigajoules of heat waste back at the end