New Pi record: 2.7 trillion digits, calculated on a desktop PC!

Fabrice Bellard, touting an algorithm 20 times more efficient any any other, has just calculated pi nearly 2.7 trillion digits. In doing so he beats the existing record of 2.6 trillion set in August 2009. But this isn't just a victory in the number-of-digits sense! No, this is a victory for the humble desktop PC... and for Linux, because of course, every home brew wannabe supercomputer runs Linux!

This is the first time ever that a standard PC has sat atop the pi calculation throne -- all prior records have been held by supercomputers with vast amounts of processing power. The machine used, a Core i7 running at 3GHz, would be completely unexceptionable if it wasn't for its 7.5TB of hard disk space. How much space does 2,699,999,990,000 digits take up I hear you ask? Well, only a terabyte it turns out -- the rest of his vast hard disk array must be used for something else...

It took Fabrice 131 days to break the record -- but considering the previous king (2.6 trillion) took just 29 hours using a supercomputer, you can expect a new pi master to appear sooner rather than later. It's simply a matter of being bothered enough to leave a computer on -- and yes, Mr Bellard intends to release his software in due course, so you too can crunch the digits of pi.

[via Neowin -- if someone wants to work out how much space 2,699,999,990,000 digits in a flat text file would actually use, do let me know in the comments...]

Tags: algorithm, desktop, geek, pi